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AN ANALYSIS OF CONFLICTS IN MRS. GASKELL'S
NORTH AND SOUTH
THESIS
Presented to the Graduate Council of the
North Texas State University in Partial
Fulfillment of the Requirements
For the Degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
By
Kathleen B. Brown, B.A.
Denton, Texas
May, 1976
0,
Brown, Kathleen B., An Analysis of Conflicts in Mrs.
Gaskell's North and South.
Master of Arts (English), May,
1976, 81 pp., bibliography, 25 titles.
Both contemporary and modern critics recognize the
industrial,
South.
regional,
and personal conflicts
There are, however,
treats and resolves.
in North and
other conflicts which Mrs. Gaskell
This study emphasizes inner struggles
resulting from repressive Victorian sexual mores.
An examina-
tion of conflicts at a deeper -level than has previously been
attempted clarifies motivations of individual characters,
reveals a conscious and unconscious pattern within the novel
and gives a fuller appreciation of Mrs. Gaskell's psychological
insight.
Included for discussion are examples of the Victorian
feminine stereotype and the use of religion as sexual sublimation.
A major portion of the paper concerns the growth of
the heroine, Margaret Hale, from repressed sexuality to an
acceptance of womanhood in Victorian society.
.ow
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
CHAPTER
III.
IV.
.
.......
FEMININE CHARACTERIZATIONS IN
NORTH AND SOUTH IN RELATION TO
THE VICTORIAN STEREOTYPE
VI.
VII.
.
THE SYMBOLIC FUNCTION OF HELSTONE IN
. ........
NORTH AND SOUTH.
.
15
. . .
27
. . .
39
MARGARET AND FREDERICK............
. . .
53
MARGARET HALE AND JOHN THORNTON
. .
.
62
. . .
78
VICTORIAN RELIGION AS
SEXUAL SUBLIMATION
V.
....
.
II.
INTRODUCTION.
CONCLUSION
.
. . .
.
. 0.
0..
..
0.0.
9
0
..0.
.
. .
.
I.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.....................
82
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
Elizabeth Gaskell's first novel, Mary Barton, published
in 1848, concerned the misery of the working classes in
Manchester during the years of rapid industrialization in
England.
The novelist wrote in sympathy for the living con-
ditions of the factory operatives and their families, resulting
from the laissez-faire attitudes of the manufacturers.
novel was a popular success, but Mrs.
cism for emphasizing the employers'
By the year 1854,
attitudes had changed.
The
Gaskell received criti-
apparent unconcern.
times and some of Mrs.
Gaskell's
From September 2, 1854,
to January 27,
1855, her novel North and South was serialized in Household
Words, a magazine edited by Charles Dickens.
The novel was
published in two volumes in late 1855 by Chapman and Hall.
In this book, ostensibly concerned with the same social theme
as Mary Barton, Mrs.
Gaskell, an open-minded woman, elicited
more sympathy for the manufacturers than previously.
Gerald
DeWitt Sanders considers several reasons that could account
for her shift in emphasis.
He points out that although Mrs.
Gaskell still felt compassion for the workers, she could look
about her and see changes which had been made for their betterment.
The "hungry forties" were over.
had been repealed in 1846,
The Corn Laws of 1815
lifting the burden of high prices
1
2
for bread.
Irish immigration, a result of the potato famine
of 1845, aroused hostility in the English workers.
groups clashed,
The two
depriving the workmen of some of the strong
sympathy felt for them by the populace, which had been made
aware of their sufferings by writers such as Mrs.
Gaskell,
Dickens, Disraeli, Kingsley, and others.1
Sanders suggests that Mrs.
Gaskell, always sensitive to
criticism, might possibly have decided to avert further negative comment by a more balanced approach to the industrial
problem in North and South.
He feels,
however,
that the most
likely reason for her change in emphasis, though not in basic
belief, was
that she had listened to her critics.
She came to
see that the one-sided attitude of Mary Barton did not present
the entire picture.
Mrs.
Gaskell,
living in Manchester, could
closely observe both sides of the struggle and present a fair
analysis of the manufacturers' viewpoint without abandoning
her sympathies for the operatives. 2
Although her attitude
became more balanced in North and South, Mrs. Gaskell's solutions were basically the same as in Mary Barton.
Annette
Hopkins says that Mrs. Gaskell's liberal social views expressed
her basic concept of Christianity.
The novelist believed in
the application of Christian ethics to everyday life, stressing
Gerald DeWitt Sanders, Elizabeth Gaskell (New Haven,
1929), p. 66.
2 Ibid.
,
p. 68.
3
a spirit of tolerance and acceptance of differing opinions.
Although she opposed violence in the workers and the laissezfaire attitude of the manufacturers,
she did not believe in
passivity but in cooperation on both sides of the industrial
struggle.3
According to Yvonne Ffrench Mrs. Gaskell's mission
was one of meditation. 4
The industrial problem constitutes an important theme in
North and South, but the book is one of multi-layered conflicts, a fact which sets it apart from the
social novels,
Mary Barton and Ruth.
Mrs. Gaskell had originally wanted to
entitle her novel Margaret Hale, but Dickens suggested North
and South,
and she acquiesced.
The title reflects a crucial
point concerning this novel, for conflict is inherent throughout.
The harsh,
industrial, northern section of England
produced attitudes very different from those of the slowerpaced, more rural,
aristocratic southern region.
The North
had the energetic drive for power and aggressive push for
industrialization lacking in the South.
Fortunes were made
quickly and could be lost just as quickly.
on their own initiative,
North and South.
Men rose to power
as did John Thornton,
the hero of
The aristocracy of the North was based on
money, not inherited social position.
power, which was often not used wisely.
With that money came
Margaret Hale, the
3Annette B. Hopkins, "Liberalism in
the Social Teachings of
Mrs. Gaskell," Social Service Review, 5, No. 1 (1931), 57-73.
4 Yvonne
Ffrench, Mrs.
Gaskell
(Denver, 1949), p.
28.
4
heroine of North and South, is from the South with its genteel,
traditional culture and inherited privilege.
When she comes
to the northern industrial city of Milton, she brings with her
a snobbish disdain for "shoppy" people who know little or
nothing of her world.
Milton's ugliness shocks Margaret.
Its streets are full of rough mill workers who speak a coarse
Lancashire dialect.
Helstone, Margaret's Hampshire village,
was an Eden in a forest setting of tranquility and softness.
She is brought abruptly out of her protected environment into
one of conflicting values.
The struggle between "masters and men," the employers and
employees in the large northern factories, constitutes another
area of conflict within the novel.
Although, as previously
mentioned, conditions had improved for the operatives
factories, many injustices
still existed.
in the
Conditions could,
on occasion, become explosive, and much remained to be done
to alleviate suffering and bring understanding between the
workers and their masters.
John Thornton,
as one of the
masters who believed in the laissez-faire philosophy, gradually
accepts the fact that only through conciliation and fairness
on both sides can life be made better for both employer and
employee.
His relationship with Margaret and those close to
her is pivotal in bringing about the change within him.
The overt conflict between Margaret Hale and John Thornton
dominates the novel.
in the Hales'
It is obvious from the time they meet
new home in Milton that an attraction exists.
5
Although the socio-economic theme and its ramifications concern Mrs. Gaskell,
it is the development of her characters
that most occupies the novelist in North and South.
characters grow in a convincing,
The
if tortuous, manner.
Margaret
and Thornton, coming from polar extremes, gradually realize
their interdependence,
thus paralleling the conciliatory
conclusions of the masters and men.
Mrs.
Gaskell blends the differing conflicts within the
novel with skill.
She handles her interweaving of personal
and social relations with an aptitude she did not possess when
she wrote Mary Barton.
achievement:
Arthur Pollard says of Mrs. Gaskell's
"In North and South Mrs.
Gaskell has achieved
a coalescence between personal and public stories in the
relationship of the two main characters." 5
Edgar Wright says,
"If there is any tug between theme and characters,
the characters who win;
it will be
that is inherent in Mrs. Gaskell's
outlook."6
Beneath the conflicts discussed above lie others not so
easily discernible.
North and South may be viewed wholly as
a typical Victorian novel,
novelist,
but as
in any creative work, other, more subtle
dimensions exist.
5Arthur
(Cambridge,
6 Edgar
(London,
written by a typical Victorian
The love story of Margaret and Thornton
Pollard, Mrs. Gaskell: Novelist and Biographer
1966),
p.
183.
Wright, Mrs. Gaskell:
1965),
p.
132.
The Basis for Reassessment
6
is simple and direct on the surface,
but underlying their
struggle for harmony and eventual completeness
relationship is a more dramatic conflict.
Mrs.
in a love
Gaskell de-
lineates the Victorian conflict between men and women in
general and shows deeper, repressed sexual conflicts within
the individual characters.
In the character of Margaret
Hale, Mrs. Gaskell presents a Victorian woman who struggles
to achieve psychic balance in a patriarchal society.
This
paper will explore the inner conflicts Margaret suffers in
the process of growing from the innocence of Victorial girlhood to an acceptance of herself as a woman in a man's world.
Most Gaskell critics acknowledge her gift of psychological insight, but they fail to consider the effects of Victorian
society upon her unconscious mind.
Wright says that Mrs.
Gaskell shows a "shrewd discernment of human nature.??7
Sharps comments that Mrs.
Gaskell has an "observant
the psychologically meaningful.
J.
G.
eye for
These critics and others
ignore the influence of Victorian mores on the developing
relationship of the two principal characters.
In North and South, Mrs. Gaskell
indeed reveals a sensi-
tivity and psychological accuracy that allows her characters
to emerge.
But although she was broad-minded and educated,
Mrs. Gaskell wrote in an era that had not yet confronted
7Ibid.,p.
J. G.
(Sussex,
224.
Sharps, Mrs. Gaskell's Observation
and Invention
1970), p. 2127
7
unconscious drives.
The symptomology existed, but the roots
remained unexplored.
levels
Thus one must assume that the deepest
of conflict within the story came from the novelist's
unconscious mind.
Russell M. Goldfarb says that "whatever
the Victorians consciously or unconsciously intended to do,
the meaning of Victorian literature is greatly expanded when
one pays attention to its sexual dimension." 9
In order for one to understand the psychological problems
facing the heroine of North and South,
it is necessary to
ascertain what constituted the stereotyped Victorian female
and to examine some aspects of Mrs. Gaskell's life and personality.
Because of the revival of the feminist movement in
recent years, many writers have turned their attention to
woman's role throughout history.
Martha Vicinus
in the intro-
duction to Suffer and Be Still, a collection of essays
concerning the "woman question" in nineteenth-century England,
depicts the ideal of Victorian femininity, showing the evolution of this ideal from the pre-Victorian to the late-Victorian
era.
She points out that at the beginning of the nineteenth
century the ideal woman was the "perfect wife," who served
many useful purposes,
but most importantly childbearing.
In
the lower and middle classes, the wife worked diligently,
providing care and sometimes, particularly in the lower classes,
income for the family.
9 Russell
She contributed to her family's welfare
M. Goldfarb, Sexual Repression and Victorian
Literature (Lewisburg, 1970), p. 65.
8
by her skills in home management,
cooking,
giving her efforts to
sewing, and child care. 1 0
Gradually the ideal of the "perfect wife" gave way to
that of the "perfect lady."
A girl
with a total ignorance of sexuality.
was reared
in innocence,
The "perfect lady" was
predominantly a phenomenon of the upper-middle class, but her
counterpart existed in all strata of society.
Families of
"perfect ladies" stressed certain attributes and ignored
others.
Filial duty, an innate feeling towards motherhood,
and religiosity were qualities that were fostered, while a
sense of individual identity, in particular sexual identity,
was squelched.
The female was identified completely by her
status within the family--either as her father's daughter,
her husband's wife,
or hopelessly for her,
female who existed in a familial limbo.
the unmarried
Education was limited
to pointless pursuits and "accomplishments" such as doing
intricate needlework, taking voice lessons, and playing a
musical instrument.
No proper Victorian lady expressed
opinions on issues that were of any import beyond the family
or local
sphere.
Vicinus says that "In her most perfect form,
the lady combined total
sumption,
sexual
innocence,
conspicuous con-
and the worship of the family hearth." 1
10
Martha Vicinus,
1972), p. ix.
11Ibid.
ed., Suffer and Be Still
(Bloomington,
9
The social background,
then,
against which Mrs. Gaskell
was writing taught its women from the cradle onwards to be
helpless,
childlike,
submissive, and domestic.
Women did
not have civil rights and were treated as generally inferior
as regarded their character and constitution.
An example of how Victorians viewed women relative to
men is John Ruskin's essay published in 1865, entitled "Of
Queens'
Gardens."
He compares the two sexes:
Now their separate characters are briefly these.
The man's power is active, progressive, defensive.
He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer,
the defender.
His intellect is for speculation and
invention; his energy for adventure, for war, and for
conquest wherever war is just, wherever conquest is
necessary.
But the woman's power is for rule, not
for battle--and her intellect is not for invention
or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement,
and decision. . . . Her great function is Praise:
she enters into no contest, but infallibly adjudges
the crown of contest.
By her office, and place,
she is protected from all danger and temptation.
Ruskin has contradictorily praised women in his manly, chivalrous way, but he has also placed them in a position of passive
ineffectiveness.
Ruskin's last statement, that they are
"protected from all danger and temptation,"
is crucial to
the point being considered.
The protection of the female was of paramount importance
to the Victorians.
Keeping their daughters in a state of
childlike innocence was their goal.
Peter Cominos refers to
this species of Victorian womanhood as "Innocent Femina
1 2 John
Root
Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, ed.
(New York, 1904), pp. 82-83.
Robert Kilburn
10
Sensualis."
Her internal conflict as described by Cominos
indicates the unconscious plight of heroines in numerous
Victorian novels; it is certainly applicable to Mrs. Gaskell's
heroine, Margaret Hale.
Innocent Femina Sensualis waged her battle between sensual desire and duty at an unconscious
level.
Innocence, as the mechanism of sexual
repression, played the key role in making the
conflict unconscious.
Respectable Victorians
did not understand the mechanism, but they de-
sired the results.
For them, "innocence" or
"pure-mindedness" or "inherent purity" was an
exalted state of feminine consciousness, a state
of unique deficiency or mindlessness in their
daughters of that most elementary, but forbidden
knowledge of their own sexuality, instincts and
desires as well as the knowledge of good and evil. 1 3
The medical profession contributed to the myth of the
almost non-existent sexual nature of the Victorian woman.
William Acton,
a prominent, highly respected physician, wrote
a medical treatise in 1857 entitled The Functions and Disorders
of the Reproductive Organs.
Acton writes of women briefly in
this book, presenting a picture of what he thought the typical
"modest English woman" to be in terms of her basic sexuality:
I should say that the majority of women
(happily for them) are not very much troubled
What men are
habitually, women are only exceptionally.
. .
.
with sexual feeling of any kind.
.
I admit, of course, the existence of sexual
excitement terminating even in nymphomania . .
but with these sad exceptions, there can be no
doubt that sexual feeling in the female is in
the majority of cases in abeyance . . . and even
if aroused (which in many instances it never can
13 Peter Cominos, "Innocent Femina Sensualis in Unconscious
Conflict," in Suffer and Be Still, ed. Martha Vicinus (Bloomington, 1972) p. 157.
11
be) is very moderate compared with that of the
male. . . . The best mothers, wives, and managers
of households know little or nothing of sexual
indulgences.
Love of home, children, and domestic
duties are the only passions they feel.1 4
Elizabeth Gaskell, born in 1810 in Chelsea and reared by
an aunt in the village of Knutsford, felt the influence of
Victorian attitudes towards women.
She was a proper though
vivacious Victorian lady, fulfilling many of the roles society
had assigned to her.
In 1832 she married William Gaskell,
then the assistant minister of Cross Street Unitarian Chapel
in Manchester.
Thus she,
like her heroine Margaret Hale,
left her rural girlhood environment to live in the industrial
North.
Mrs. Gaskell reared four daughters, seeming fully to
enjoy the pleasures of motherhood.i15
As a minister's wife
she led an active, often hectic life, and she saw many aspects
of living in the grimy city of Manchester.
Her compassionate
nature found ample avenues for expression in working with the
results of an unjust social system principally through charitable activities of her husband's church.
Although Mrs.
Gaskell appears to have been the idealized Victorian woman,
she had elements in her life and personality that set her
apart.
She was a dutiful wife and mother,
but she was also
a writer, and, as such, had to struggle with conflicts even
14
William Acton, The Functions and Disorders of the
Reproductive Organs, as quoted by Steven Marcus, ThEi Other
Victorians (New York, 1964), p. 31.
isFfrench,
p. 38.
12
more complex than those of the average Victorian woman.
As
has been mentioned, Mrs. Gaskell had a psychological astuteness that aided her as a writer.
look at her own conflicts.
in early 1850:
This insight enabled her to
She wrote her friend, Tottie Fox,
"One thing is pretty clear, women must give
up an artist's life,
if home duties are to be paramount.
is different with men,
of their life."16
It
whose home duties are so small a part
She also recognized that she had a multi-
faceted personality, which caused some of these conflicts.
In another letter to Miss Fox, she observes:
. another
of my mes is a wife and mother
now that's my "social" self I suppose.
.
One of my mes is, I do believe, a true Christian
Then again
I've another self with a full taste for beauty and
convenience which is pleased on its own account.
How am I to reconcile all these warring members?1
7
Mrs. Gaskell was an idealist concerning Christianity.
She spoke little on religion but believed very firmly in
living by the teachings of Christianity in regard to her
fellow man.8
Although she generally avoided the subject of
religion in her personal life, the topic finds its way into
her fiction, but rarely in a doctrinaire fashion.
It was
perhaps through her fiction that she was dealing with some
16 Elizabeth
Gaskell, The Letters of Elizabeth Gaskell,
ed. J. A. V. Chapple and A.TPollard (Ciibridge, 1967),
p. 106.
The italics used in the quotation are Mrs. Gaskell's.
17 Ibid.,
'
8
p. 108.
Ffrench, p.
31.
13
of her religious conflicts.
Her reasoning nature accepted
the precepts of Unitarianism, but she loved the ritual of
the Anglican and Roman Catholic faiths.1 9
The latter two
enter her fiction frequently and are handled without censure.
Mrs. Gaskell was not an overt feminist.
She reluctantly
signed the Married Women's Property Act in 1856.
She remained
convinced throughout her life that laws could not change the
human heart, and she consciously accepted the traditional
view that men were truly the rulers in their homes.20
Mrs.
Gaskell, aware at some level of consciousness of her conflicts,
realized she had to come to terms with being a woman with
Victorian boundaries.
She chaffed at these boundaries, as
the excerpts from her letters indicate, but she was no militant spokeswoman for women's rights and did not defy convention
as, for example, George Eliot did.
writings,
However, throughout her
she does exhibit a tendency to handle the man-woman
question with a certain underlying hostility that rises quite
close to the surface on occasion, then can be glimpsed as only
a fleeting suggestion at other times.
in North and South,
Some of her motivations
in which she reveals her ambiguous feel-
ings towards Victorian society, will be examined further.
Aspects of the novel that do not seem artistically consistent
1 9 Annette
Work (New York,
2 0 Aina
B. Hopkins, Elizabeth Gaskell:
1971), p. 239.
Her Life and
Rubenius, The Woman Question in Mrs.
Life and Works (Upsala,195O), p. 224.
Gaskell's
14
gain significance when viewed as the product of Mrs.
Gaskell's
unconscious feelings.
An article by Martin Dodsworth concerns Mrs. Gaskell's
handling of her possible unconscious hostilities towards men
in her novel, Cranford.
Dodsworth traces the story line in
the seemingly innocuous tale of Miss Matty and her women
friends of Cranford.
He points out that Mrs. Gaskell permits
Captain Brown to be killed early in the tale, then throughout
the remainder of the book seeks expiation for his death in a
variety of ways.
Several instances of transvestitism are
mentioned, as Mrs. Gaskell seeks some sort of psychological
recognition of the intertwining of the two sexes and its
inevitability.
Dodsworth concludes that Mrs. Gaskell shows
a healthy acceptance of the fact that the two
sexes need one
another and that unfortunate consequences result from "attempting to repress sexual needs under the cover of feminism." 2 1
Although Dodsworth's analysis of Cranford need not be
totally accepted, it is difficult to dismiss the thread of
conflict, both overt and unconscious, that runs through Mrs.
Gaskell's works.
The conflicts
in North and South represent
the complicated feelings of Mrs. Gaskell and her fellow
Victorians.
2 1 Martin
Dodsworth, "Women Without Men at Cranford,"
Essays in Criticism, 13, No. 2 (1963), 132-45.
CHAPTER II
FEMININE CHARACTERIZATIONS IN NORTH AND SOUTH
IN RELATION TO THE VICTORIAN STEREOTYPE
The female characterizations in North and South demonstrate various ways
in which Victorian women adapted them-
selves to their male-dominated society.
Mrs. Gaskell presents
several personality types ranging from weak females who
conform to Victorian standards to strong women who do not
seem to fit
the pattern.
will be considered,
In this chapter,
six characters
with emphasis on the outer manifestations
of their attempts to cope with their environment.
Subsequent
chapters will examine the inner conflicts that produced these
behavior patterns.
Peter Cominos describes the kind of dependent Victorian
female whom Mrs.
Gaskell includes in North and South.
He
says that these women had weak egos, which precluded any
sense of "I-ness" or separateness.
They were brought up
believing that their childish behavior would suffice in a
life of dependence on others.
Victorian girls were encouraged
in their passivity and discouraged in pursuits that would
allow them to survive on their own.
Young women expected,
when they married,
dependent on their
husbands,
to become
totally
living their lives through them and for them.
They found whatever identity they could through marriage
15
16
and family life.1
Martha Vicinus refers to women who
conformed to this role as "disfunctional and idle.?" 2
An excellent example of the childish Victorian woman
appears in the first pages of North and South in the character of Margaret Hale's cousin, Edith Shaw.
Edith plans to
be married shortly, but she exhibits no traits
of womanly
maturity.
Mrs. Gaskell describes the young woman as though
she were a small child,
"looking very lovely in her white
muslin and blue ribbons." 3
Talk of weddings, gowns, and
keeping Edith's piano in good tune is interrupted by
Margaret's discovery that "Edith had rolled herself up into
a soft ball of muslin and ribbon and silken curls, and gone
off into a peaceful little after dinner nap" (p. 2).
Edith
fits Cominos's concept of the female with weak ego-strength.
Whatever her mother wishes, she assents to, and her pattern
of acquiescence will go with her into marriage.
Mrs.
Gaskell
possessed no Freudian terminology, but she grasps the essence
of Edith's personality when she comments
was a spoiled child,
that "although she
she was too careless and idle to have a
very strong will of her own"
(p. 2).
Peter Cominos, "Innocent Femina Sensualis in Unconscious
Conflict," in Suffer and Be Still, ed. Martha Vicinus (Bloomington, 1972), pp.
160-161.
2
Martha Vicinus, ed., Suffer and Be Still
1972), p. ix.
3
(Bloomington,
Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South, Knutsford Edition
(London, 1906), p. 1.
Hereafter,references to this edition
will be indicated in the text by the page number enclosed in
parentheses.
17
When Edith marries Captain Lennox,
she goes with him to
Corfu, determined to be a good officer's wife, although she
would have preferred a pleasant home in Belgravia.
After
she has left England, Edith's letters to her cousin Margaret
indicate that she is the same "affectionate and inconsequent"
girl-woman she was before her marriage.
She is pleased by
the sunshine, the band music, the picnics, and the antics of
her baby boy.
Like her mother before her, she complains of
her husband, who has become "stout and grumpy," one whom she
professes not to love as much as she loves her baby.
Res-
ponsibility and conscience are alien to Edith's nature;
she
is uncomfortable about Margaret's father's being a Dissenter
and writes to her cousin, "Dear Margaret,
if he would like
to accompany you and Aunt Hale, we will try and make it
pleasant,
though I'm rather afraid of anyone who has done
something for conscience' sake.
79).
You never did, I hope" (278-
Unlike her cousin, Edith never grows beyond the simple
world of girlhood.
Mrs.
She never confronts herself as a woman.
Shaw is the elder counterpart of her daughter Edith.
She suffers from the same lack of individuality,
looking
backward instead of forward to a marriage made for all the
wrong reasons.
The General gave her a position in life; he
also gave her an excuse to spend her life fretting about a
loveless marriage for which she compensates by arranging her
daughter's marital match.
Mrs. Gaskell gently, but aptly,
delineates the character of Margaret's Aunt Shaw:
18
Now that, the General being gone,
she had every
good of life, with as few drawbacks as possible,
she had been rather perplexed to find an anxiety,
if not a sorrow.
She had, however, of late settled
upon her own health as a source of apprehension;
she had a nervous little cough whenever she thought
about it;
and some complaisant doctor ordered her
just what she desired--a winter in Italy. Mrs.
Shaw had as strong wishes as most people, but she
never liked to do anything from the open and acknow-
ledged motive of her own good will and pleasure; she
preferred being held to gratify herself by some
other person's command or desire.
She really did
persuade herself that she was submitting to some
hard external necessity; and thus she was able to
moan and complain in her soft manner, all the time
she was in reality doing just what she liked (p.
Material comfort, petty luxuries,
important to Mrs. Shaw;
life with meaning.
11).
and social amenities are
they seemed to fill an otherwise vapid
She wishes the same kind of life for her
daughter and for her niece, Margaret.
Margaret's mother, Mrs. Hale, is cast in somewhat the
same mold as Mrs. Shaw and Edith.
She displays no great
strength of character and manages to dominate in the only way
she knows how--by childlike fussiness and a tendency to whine
about her life; every turn of events is a hardship for her.
Her marriage to Mr.
Hale, an Anglican clergyman, brings
little satisfaction because she has come down on the
scale and must envy her sister, Mrs.
in London.
Shaw,
social
better situated
She complains of her life in the village of
Helstone, saying, "It is undoubtedly one of the most
out-ofthe-way places in England"
(p.
17).
She feels the bishop is
unfair to Mr. Hale in not giving him a bigger, better parish.
She convinces herself that the trees of the nearby forest
19
affect her health.
Then when the family must move to Milton,
the dirty, sunless air becomes a threat to her.
When she
learns of the impending departure from Helstone, she cannot
cope with the problems involved in "removing."
Mrs. Gaskell
concisely summarizes Mrs. Hale's entire approach to life when
she relates how the frail woman reacts in that situation:
"Mrs. Hale, overpowered by all the troubles and necessities
for immediate household decisions that seemed to come upon
her at once, became really ill,
and Margaret almost felt it
as a relief when her mother fairly took to her bed, and left
the management of affairs to her"
(p.
54).
Throughout the
novel Mrs. Hale fails to take an active positive role in the
Hale family's trials.
In a sense, she finally attains some
satisfaction in her fatal illness.
"She was gentle and quiet
in intense bodily suffering, almost in proportion as she had
been restless and depressed when there had been no real cause
for grief"
(p. 121).
John Thornton's sister,
Fanny,
is a classic example of
the mindlessly insipid female of the Victorian era.
She
frequently gives in to fainting spells and fits of hysterics.
Mrs. Gaskell reveals her attitude towards Fanny and her ilk
by stating what the girl's own mother felt for her:
She had an unconscious contempt for a weak character;
and Fanny was weak in the very points in which her
mother and brother were strong. . . . She felt instinctively that nothing could strengthen Fanny to
endure hardships patiently, or face difficulties
bravely; and though she winced as she made this
acknowledgment to herself about her daughter, it
20
only gave her a kind of pitying tenderness of
manner towards her; much of the same description
of demeanor with which mothers are wont to treat
their weak and sickly children (p. 109).
Fanny resembles Mrs. Hale in her tendency to ailments, a
pattern of behavior that brings the undisguised contempt of
her strong-willed brother.
Like Edith, Fanny concerns her-
self with the trappings of ideal young womanhood.
On meeting
Margaret in the Hales' Milton home, Fanny expresses dismay
that the Hales sold their old piano before their move.
Her
values are obvious as she remarks to Margaret, "I wonder how
you can exist without one.
of life" (p. 112).
It almost seems to me a necessary
Later, she speaks disparagingly of Margaret:
"And she's not accomplished, mamma.
She can't play"
(p. 167).
Fanny proves to be worthless in a crisis, just as her mother
had feared.
When the striking mob of workers surrounds the
Thornton home, she experiences panic, "screaming upstairs as
if pursued at every step" (p. 206).
Fanny, choosing to deny
the masculine world surrounding her, hates the mills and
factories of Milton.
She casts her lot on the side of "ideal
femininity."
Annette Hopkins takes issue with Mrs. Gaskell's portrayal
of weak personalities in North and South.
She feels that the
author draws these characters with too heavy a hand, making
caricatures of them.4
4 Annette
Work
However, in view of the Victorian
B. Hopkins, Elizabeth Gaskell: Her Life and
(New York, 1971), p. 143.
21
stereotype of acceptable feminine behavior, Mrs.
Gaskell had
no doubt observed many such characters in her everyday life.
If the characters had been presented with more subtlety, Mrs.
Gaskell's psychological accuracy would have been blunted.
Mrs. Thornton, unlike her empty-headed daughter and the
other weak woman in North and South, displays strength and
stoicism.
She glories in her life as the mother of manufac-
turer John Thornton,
identifying with the masculine world of
business and power.
She revels in the machinery and the
"magnificent warehouses" of Milton.
She loves her son with
a jealous intensity, which, of course, brings her into
conflict with Margaret Hale.
Her attachment
to her son and
his successful business indicates one solution for women in
a male-oriented society.
According to Aina Rubenius, Mrs.
Gaskell did not sympathize with strongly masculine women.5
Thus,
she not only softens Mrs. Thornton with touches of
gentleness, but she also makes it clear that Mrs. Thornton
is living through her son;
being the mother of a strong
independent man is a cause for thankfulness.
gave thanks for him day and night;
among women for his sake"
(p.
"But her heart
and she walked proudly
109).
Mrs. Gaskell reveals the most sympathetic facet of Mrs.
Thornton's character when she presents her as the solitary
5Aina
Rubenius, The Woman Question in Mrs. Gaskell's
Life and Work (Upsala, 1950), n.i., p. 75.
22
mother awaiting her son's announcement of his engagement.
Courageous in the face of personal danger, she reacts typically as the mother of an only son when she fears
being supplanted by another woman in his life.
alone, going through her fine linens
she is
She waits
in preparation for the
change coming in her household.
There was some confusion between what was hers and
consequently marked G. H. T.
(for George and Hannah
Thornton), and what was her son's--bought with his
money, marked with his initials.
Some of those
marked G. H. T. were Dutch damask of the old kind,
exquisitely fine; none were like them now.
Mrs.
Thornton stood looking at them long--they had been
her pride when she was first married.
Then she knit
her brows, and pinched and compressed her lips tight,
and carefully unpicked the G. H.
She went so far
as to search for the Turkey-red marking-thread to
put in the new initials; but it was all used--and
she had no heart to send for any more just yet
(p. 248).
Mrs. Thornton's sternness gives way to melancholy and pain;
her customary strength fails her,
and she must sit as she
contemplates a new mistress in the Thornton household.
Mrs. Gaskell held motherhood in high esteem, feeling in
typical Victorian fashion that no woman could be completely
fulfilled without it.6
But being a successful writer,
she
also felt the tug of existence beyond domesticity as she
noted in her letter to Tottie Fox.
In Mrs. Thornton,
she
manages to combine something of both ways of life, although
in an oblique manner, because of the vicarious nature of Mrs.
6 Ibid.,
p. 29.
23
Thornton's power.
Ironically, Mrs. Thornton has more in
common with her antagonist and future daughter-in-law
Margaret Hale than with any other woman in the novel.
Margaret Hale, the heroine of North and South,
is, as
Yvonne Ffrench says, "compounded of contradictory elements." 7
On the surface, Margaret does not conform to the concept of
the "ideal lady"; although she has some traits held in high
esteem by Victorian society,
able patterns of behavior.
she exhibits other,
less accept-
Mrs. Gaskell gives Margaret a
less-than-perfect personality, thus creating a complicated
young woman who has appeal because of her human qualities.
Even Margaret's physical appearance suggests a lack of perfection,
but it gives her an attractiveness that transcends
ordinary beauty.
Sometimes people wondered that parents so handsome
should have a daughter who was so far from regularly
beautiful; not beautiful at all, was occasionally
said.
Her mouth was wide; no rosebud that could
only open just enough to let out a "yes" and "no"
and "an't please you, sir."
But the wide mouth was
one soft curve of rich red lips; and the skin, if
not white and fair, was of an ivory smoothness and
delicacy.
If the look on her face was, in general,
too dignified and reserved for one so young,
now,
talking to her father it was bright as the morning--
full of dimples and glances that spoke of childish
gladness and boundless hope in the future
Mrs.
(p.
15).
Gaskell refers to Margaret many times in the novel
as "queenly,"
"regal," and an "empress."
She has an air of
haughtiness about her and an aura of authority and seems to
7
Yvonne Ffrench,
Mrs.
Gaskell
(Denver,
1949),
p.
60.
24
be in control of herself and of others in most instances.
Margaret does not fit the role of the submissive, Victorian
female described by Cominos.
She is too strong, too opinion-
ated, too willing to pit her will against anyone, male or
female.
Yet she is a faithful daughter; she has piety, and
she goes among the oppressed with concern.
In handling Margaret's relationship to her parents, Mrs.
Gaskell reveals two facets of the girl's character.
As a
daughter, Margaret shows exemplary traits; she recognizes her
responsibilities towards her parents, and her devotion never
wavers.
In the execution of her filial duties, Margaret's
strength contrasts vividly with the weakness of her parents,
who lean heavily upon her in a crisis.
When Mr. Hale feels
he can no longer remain a vicar, he implores Margaret to tell
her mother, as he cannot bring himself to do so.
Although
she dreads the thought of it, Margaret "conquers herself,"
and assures her father, "It is a painful thing, but it must
be done, and I will do it as well as ever I can.
have many painful things to do" (p. 40).
You must
Mrs. Gaskell con-
trasts the weakness and strength of father and daughter
directly:
Before the things were cleared away, Mr. Hale got up;
he leaned one hand on the table, as if to support
himself-"I shall not be home until evening . . . I shall
be back to tea at seven."
He did not look at either of them, but Margaret
knew what he meant.
By seven the announcement must
be made to her mother.
Mr. Hale would have delayed
making it till half-past six, but Margaret was of
different stuff (p. 47).
25
In Mrs. Hale's final illness, Margaret cares for her
jealously, wishing to minister to her every need.
In a
single statement she expresses the desire to tend her mother
and her contempt for weakness in other women:
"Dixon could
not give me credit for enough true love--for as much as herself!
She thought,
I suppose,
that I was one of those poor
sickly women who like to lie on rose leaves and be fanned
all day" (p. 151).
When Mrs. Hale dies, Margaret, heartsick
and weary, must maintain her strength for the
men in the family.
sake of the
"The father and brother depended upon
her; while they were giving way to grief, she must be working,
planning,
considering.
Even the necessary arrangements for
the funeral seemed to devolve upon her"
(p. 298).
In the course of the novel, many characters besides her
parents depend upon Margaret or submit to her in some manner.
Interestingly, a number of these characters are men.
Nicholas
Higgins, the mill-worker whom Margaret befriends, yields to
her will when she determines to keep him from leaving his
silent yet commanding.
"But Margaret stood in the doorway,
He looked up at her defyingly
.
.
house to find liquor:
Margaret felt that he acknowledged her power" (260-61).
Higgins agrees to ask Thornton for work because of Margaret;
he admits that "it's first time in my life as e'er I give way
to a woman"
(p.
366).
Margaret protects her brother, Frederick, when he comes
as a fugitive to see his dying mother.
Before Frederick's
26
arrival, Margaret assures her mother that she will watch
over him, and she adheres to her word,
even to the point of
lying to prevent his apprehension before he can escape
England.
She also provides him with a good London lawyer,
her friend Henry Lennox.
Even the indomitable John Thornton eventually comes
under Margaret's care.
This powerful man who loves her
faces possible financial ruin, but is rescued by Margaret,
who has, fortuitously, become wealthy.
Thus, before Mrs.
Gaskell can give Margaret to Thornton in marriage, he must
be humbled.
Mrs. Gaskell's sympathetic portrayal of Margaret indicates the affinity she felt for this kind of woman.
struggles for reconciliation,
Margaret's
both inward and outward, could
well have been Mrs. Gaskell's own.
The two women, the heroine
and her creator, have many similar standards and, therefore,
similar conflicts.
This is not to say that Margaret is Mrs.
Gaskell's alter-ego, for the heroine of North and South
possesses her own personality and comes alive through Mrs.
Gaskell's skill as a novelist.
Margaret's behavior patterns,
as well as those of the other women discussed,
illustrate the
dilemma in which Victorian women found themselves.
Weak
women sacrificed selfhood for an outwardly imposed code:
unconscious conflict was the result.
Strong women,
like
Margaret, who were unwilling to sacrifice selfhood had the
double problem of both inner and outer conflict.
CHAPTER III
THE SYMBOLIC FUNCTION OF HELSTONE
IN NORTH AND SOUTH
In the Victorian patriarchal society, the female was
supposed to be thoroughly in subjection;
world was to have definite limits.
she knew that her
Social mores required
that she remain in a state of ignorance of the world, both
inside and outside herself.
The average young Victorian
girl was reared in the cloistered atmosphere of home and
family.
Although she was expected to carry on the tradition
of family life in which she had grown to marriageable age,
she came to adulthood with one side of her nature completely
repressed.
The typical middle- and upper-class Victorian
girl was totally unprepared to deal with her sensual nature
because she had been forced to remain in a state of innocence
that precluded a conscious knowledge of herself as a sexual
being.
Annie Besant, a leader in the Theosophist movement in
England in the latter part of the nineteenth century, describes and deplores her sheltered Victorian girlhood:
So I married in the winter of 1867 with no more
idea of the marriage relation than if I had been
four years old instead of twenty.
My dreamy life,
into which no knowledge of evil had been allowed to
penetrate, in which I had been guarded from all pain,
shielded from all anxiety, kept innocent on all
27
28
questions of sex, was no preparation for married
existence and left me defenseless to face a rude
awakening.
Looking back on it all, I deliberately
say that no more fatal blunder can be made than to
train a girl to womanhood in ignorance of life's
duties and burdens.
. .
. That "perfect innocence"
possession.
.
may be very beautiful, but it is a perilous
From a twentieth-century vantage point, Peter Cominos
explains the unconscious battle which was a result of the
repression described
above:
The components of the conflict were a negative prohibitive conscience and sexual desire. . . . From
a very early age, feminine conscience was deeply
penetrated with the fear of becoming aware of sensuality, which in itself was bad feminine conscience.
. . . So-called innocence was tantamount to good
conscience, although it is clear that girls would
always be in doubt about the completeness or thoroughness of their
nnocence, which in turn produced
guilt and anxiety.
The theme of reconciliation of conflicts in North and
South reaches its deepest level in Margaret Hale's unconscious struggle towards sexual maturity.
Although Mrs.
Gaskell certainly does not handle this level of the novel
explicitly, a careful reading reveals an obvious pattern
within the author's mind and consequently within the mind
of
Margaret Hale.
A clue to this pattern exists in the function
of the village of Helstone within the novel.
North and South,
The title,
implies that there will be some equality of
Annie Besant, Annie Besant: An Autobiography
(London,
1893), p. 71.
2 Peter
Cominos, "Innocent Femina Sensualis in Unconscious
Conflict," in Suffer and Be Still, ed. Martha Vicinus (Bloomington, 1972) p. 159.
29
treatment concerning the two sections of England.
But the
bulk
The South
of
the
novel concerns the North,
or Milton.
and Margaret's beloved Helstone enter the story only briefly
in actuality and occasionally come into the novel by allusion
for the purpose of contrast.
Margaret's personal history indicates the role Helstone
played in her life.
years old,
At the novel's opening, Margaret, eighteen
lives in London with her Aunt Shaw.
She had come
to live there when she was nine after spending her early childhood in Helstone.
She returns to Helstone and her parents
for a few months before the family moves to Milton, and does
not go there again except for one brief visit after the death
of both her parents.
out the novel,
develops.
Margaret speaks of the village through-
but with decreasing frequency as the story
Thus, Helstone exists for Margaret almost entirely
in her memory.
Arthur Pollard comes near to the significance
of Helstone for Margaret when he says that the village recalls
to her its physical beauty and "represents
hood." 3
J. G.
the joys of child-
Sharps comments that "Margaret is, at times,
given to idealizing Helstone." 4
Although Margaret does at times idealize Helstone, as the
novel progresses,
she becomes more realistic in her attitude
3 Arthur
Pollard, Mrs. Gaskell: Novelist and Biographer
(Cambridge, 1966), p. 119.
4
J. G. Sharps, Mrs.
(Sussex, 1970), p. 218.
Gaskell's Observation and Invention
30
towards the village.
She eventually sees and accepts the
negative as well as the positive aspects of Helstone and
the South.
The progression of Margaret's attitudes indicates
the deeper level of progression within her personality.
As
noted, Margaret spends comparatively little time in Helstone.
Therefore, the reader wonders why she should cling so lovingly
to its memory.
Viewed in terms of Margaret's unconscious
mind, her attitudes become clearer.
represents the world
of innocence;
To Margaret, Helstone
throughout the novel, it
brings to her mind visions of the uncomplicated time of her
childhood.
The soft, green, gentle world of Helstone was
one of untroubled relative non-sexuality for Margaret.
lived there during her formative innocent years;
She
because of
her Victorian upbringing, she unconsciously clings to her
innocence through associations with the village.
Margaret's
attitude towards Helstone serves as an indicator of her conflicts and her development from repressed sexuality to an
acceptance of womanhood.
After living in London for nine years, Margaret returns
to Helstone to live with her parents.
Here, at the age of
eighteen, Margaret is brought abruptly face to face with the
adult world of sexuality,
and she is unprepared for it.
Her
idyllic world is shattered in one day by two persons--Henry
Lennox and her father.
Lennox, a friend from Margaret's London days, comes to
Helstone to spend the day with the Hales.
Having an interest
31
in Margaret, he wishes to see what her life is like
in the
village she had described so lovingly to him in London.
The
first instance of Margaret's system of denial occurs
on an
innocent sketching hike taken by Margaret and Lennox.
puts her into one of his sketches,
Lennox
then tells her how much
he likes that particular one because she is in it.
goes to the brook to wash her palette
Margaret
and comes back "rather
flushed, but looking perfectly innocent and unconscious"
(p.
26).
She is strongly resisting
any thoughts
that some-
thing more than a "friendship" could exist between her
and
Henry Lennox.
the day,
But her denial cannot last, because later in
as she and Lennox are strolling along the terrace
walk, she must come face to face with sexual reality.
When
Lennox's tone of voice tells Margaret that the conversation
is taking a dangerous turn, she experiences panic for an
instant.
"She wished herself back with her mother--her father--
anywhere away from him" (p. 29).
But she quickly regains her
composure, her "strong pride," and is ashamed of herself
to
be momentarily caught off guard "as if she had not the power
to put an end to it with her high maidenly dignity" (p. 29).
When Lennox proposes to her, Margaret is horrified and
almost cries from offended innocence, because she had
not
known that he cared for her "in that way," as she puts
it so
evasively.
a sense,
The day is ruined for Margaret, and so,
is Helstone,
as her haven of innocence.
too, in
32
Margaret's thoughts later that day indicate the dual
expectations Victorians placed upon their daughters:
In the first place, Margaret felt guilty and ashamed
of having grown so much into a woman as to be thought
of in marriage; and secondly, she did not know if her
father might not be displeased that she had taken
upon herself to decline Mr.
Lennox's
proposal,(p.
34).
Her intense agitation because of a marriage proposal
reveals more about Margaret than the fact that she simply does
not love Henry Lennox.
The girl feels guilt and shame at the
thought of her womanhood and its implications.
She also has
obviously been reared to be obedient and to conform to the
natural progression from girlhood to marriage in fulfillment
of the requirement
of continuation of the "genteel family."
As Margaret muses on the day's events with Henry Lennox,
her father interrupts her thoughts with his startling announcement that he can no longer remain a minister because of his
religious doubts.
He tells her that they will be moving to
the industrial city of Milton.
Thus,
in one day, Margaret
is
thrust from her protected innocence by a marriage proposal
and also faces the prospect of entering the masculine world
of Milton.
After the day's upsetting episodes, Margaret spends a
restless night, "haunted" by dreams of Henry Lennox.
Mrs.
Gaskell reveals elementary psychological insight in the
ing of one dream about Lennox:
He was climbing up some tree of fabulous height to
reach the branch whereon was slung her bonnet:
he
was falling and she was struggling to save him, but
tell-
33
held back by some invisible powerful hand.
He
was dead.
And yet, with a shifting of the scene,
she was once more in the Harley Street drawing
room, talking to him as of old, and still with a
consciousness all the time that she had seen him
killed by that terrible fall (p. 47).
Margaret's repressed daytime thoughts surface in her dream.
Lennox's death in a fall seems to be her unconscious attempt
to deny his reality as a sexual being.
high above him in a tree,
In putting herself
she denies her own sexuality as well,
replacing it with the regal manner she uses in her conscious
life.
The language and symbolism of the dream support the Edenic
atmosphere that permeates Helstone.
The tree and Lennox's fall
from it bring an association with the Garden of Eden, the tree
of the knowledge of good and evil and man's fall from his state
of innocence.
When Margaret wakens the following morning, she
thinks about her father's doubts "which were to her temptations
of the Evil One" (p. 47).
In Margaret's mind the events of
the preceding day mingle and produce feelings of sin, guilt,
and anxiety.
The timing of Mr. Hale's announcement coincides
with Margaret's first encounter with adulthood.
Now Helstone
must become a part of the past; Margaret must go--be expelled,
as it were--from her Eden of innocence into the harsh reality
of Milton.
Several
examples of sexual
symbolism in this
section of
the novel bring into focus the idea that Margaret's world is
becoming one of deeper sexual conflicts.
Before his proposal,
34
Lennox is eating pears (an age-old sexual symbol)5 with Mr.
Hale and Margaret.
His comments on the ripe fruit are
sensual:
"Nothing is so delicious as to set one's teeth into
the crisp, juicy fruit, warm and scented by the sun.
The worst is, the wasps are impudent enough to dispute it with one, even at the very crisis and summit
of enjoyment" (p. 28).
Another example of sexual symbolism appears as Margaret
is trying to decide when she will tell her mother of their
impending move from Helstone.
Her eyes catch on a bee
entering a deep-belled flower; she decides that when the bee
flies forth, that will be her signal to tell the news.
Two weeks later, walking under the pear-tree
wall,
Margaret remembers her talk with Lennox and how, when he was
proposing to her, her eyes were fixed on a late-blowing
rose,
like the ones he had picked and handed to her earlier in that
fateful day.
to decay."
Now all is damp and dreary at dusk and "turning
In the background, Margaret, hearing the sound of
creeping in the forest, knows poachers are out there in the
dark.
She had, before this night, known that they were nearby,
yet "the wild adventurous freedom of their life had taken her
fancy; she felt inclined to wish them success;
fear of them.
(p. 60).
she had no
But tonight she was afraid, she knew not why"
The freedom of the poachers had before held fas-
cination for her,
but now other connotations enter into their
adventures; Margaret obviously has mingled feelings of fear
and fascination.
5 For
She experiences depression and anxiety at
a discussion of pears and
ear trees as sexual
bols see Bruce A. Rosenberg, "The 'Cherry-Tree Carol' and sym'The
Merchant's Tale,'" Chaucer Review, 5, No. 4 (Spring, 1971),
264-76.
35
the thought of leaving her childhood home, but because of the
nature of her thoughts and associations,
her feelings indicate
a fear of her entrance into the world of sexuality.
The eating of fruit in the garden has obvious Edenic
implications.
Mrs.
Gaskell knew the Bible well;
image would come naturally to her.
thus this
Her removal of the Hales
from their Eden in Helstone could have been a conscious device,
but the sexual symbolism almost certainly arose from unconscious associations in Mrs.
Gaskell's mind.
Throughout the novel, Helstone is to Margaret a place of
beauty and peace, but as she gradually grows into her new life
in Milton and into womanhood, with all its ramifications,
Helstone recedes bit by bit.
her gropings
Yet when she suffers pain in
through guilt and shame,
of that lost green world sweeps
the painful strike episode,
blowing,
for a moment
over her.
a memory
In Milton,
after
she wakens to feel a slight breeze
and "though there were no trees to show the playful
tossing movement caused by the wind among the leaves, Margaret
knew how,
somewhere or another, by wayside,
thick green woods,
in copses, or in
there was a pleasant, murmuring dancing
sound-.-a rushing and falling noise, the very thought of which
was an echo of distant gladness in her heart"
(p.
228).
Although occasional longings for a return to childhood
come over Margaret,
she learns in the process of maturing
that Helstone and the South are not as idyllic as she had
originally maintained.
Helstone as an archetypal Paradise
36
begins to recede in Margaret's mind, and she recognizes some
of the more unpleasant aspects of life in the faraway place
which once seemed so free of complications.
Margaret shows
this realization as she attempts to convince Nicholas Higgins
that the South would not suit him as a place to work.
She
recognizes that the poor have a difficult time there, just
as they do in the North.
She tells him that "those that have
lived there all their lives are used to soaking in the stagnant waters.
They labour on from day to day,
solitude of steaming fields--never
their poor, bent, downcast heads"
When Margaret
in the great
speaking or lifting up
(p.
364).
returns to Helstone for a visit after the
death of her parents and after having fallen in love with
John Thornton, she is saddened to see the changes:
Here and there old trees had been felled the
autumn before; or a squatter's roughly-built and
decaying cottage had disappeared. Margaret missed
them each and all and grieved over them like old
friends.
They came past the spot where she and Mr.
Lennox had sketched.
The white, lightning-scarred
trunk of the venerable beech . . . was no more; the
old man, the inhabitant of the ruinous cottage, was
dead; the cottage had been pulled down, and a new
one, tidy and respectable, had been built in its
stead.
There was a small garden on the place where
the beech-tree had been.
"I
did not think I had been so old," said
Margaret after a pause of silence;
away sighing (pp.
and she turned
463-64).
Margaret realizes that nothing in life can stay the same
except Nature and that she cannot remain in perpetual girlhood.
Even here though, on the brink of accepting womanhood,
she resists the pull of her longings for fulfillment.
She
37
thinks to herself:
"I
seek heavenly steadfastness in earthly monotony.
If I were a Roman Catholic and could deaden my
heart . .
. I might become a nun.
But I should
pine after my kind; no, not my kind, for love of
my species could never fill my heart to the utter
exclusion of love for individuals"
(p. 478).
Margaret decides that another return trip to Helstone would
be painful.
She senses that she has "put away childish things"
and must plan her future as an adult.
She loves a man who she
fears does not love her, but she has accepted both these facts
and proceeds to control her own destiny for the first time in
her life.
Thus, Margaret places Helstone in perspective:
it
will remain in her memory, but she will no longer cling to it
as an escape from the real world.
Most of the Gaskell critics mention the author's own
childhood village of Knutsford in relation to villages within
her novels.
Certainly, the biographical fact cannot be ignored,
but the psychological significance is clear
in North and South,
as it is also in Cranford.
Helstone was an early childhood
world, "untainted" by adult sexuality, just as Cranford was
a refuge of repressed sexuality.
serialized in Household Words,
When North and South was
the second Helstone section,
or Margaret's visit there with Mr.
Bell, did not exist, but
Mrs. Gaskell wrote it into the story when the novel was published in two volumes.6
She felt the Margaret-Thornton ending
was too abrupt; the fact that she chose Helstone to work
6 Sharps,
p. 217.
38
Margaret towards that final reconciliation within herself
and with Thornton, indicates the meaning Helstone had for
the author.
CHAPTER IV
VICTORIAN RELIGION AS SEXUAL SUBLIMATION
Sexually repressed Victorian women had recourse to an
outlet which,
pression;
ironically, was the cause of much of their re-
this source of both denial and release was religion.
In North and South, Mrs. Gaskell reveals how Victorian religious expression acted as an indicator of inner feelings.
Religion enters the novel in a number of manifestations,
although not as an integral part of the plot.
The treatment
of religion is of interest for what it reveals about its role
in Victorian life and particularly in the lives of women.
Criticism concerning religion in North and South has
generally been superficial or beside the point.
Most critics
confine themselves to discussing the doctrinal theme centered
around Mr. Hale's religious doubts.
"the religious motive . .
Yvonne Ffrench says that
. is deliberately given equal import-
ance with the industrial problem."
1
Annette Hopkins calls the
doctrinal theme "the weakest in the book because of the entire
vagueness with which it is treated." 2
a flaw in the novel's structure,
This vagueness may be
but it is in consonance with
Yvonne Ffrench, Mrs. Gaskell (Denver, 1949), p.
2 Annette
Work
62.
B. Hopkins, Elizabeth Gaskell: Her Life and
(New York, 1971), p. 140.
39
40
Mrs. Gaskell's own religious concepts.
As a Unitarian, Mrs.
Gaskell was not overly concerned with doctrine.
Mr.
Hale's
religious dilemma as a Dissenter provides the cause of the
family's removal from the South to the North, but aside from
this function, the conscientious clergyman's doubts do not
become pivotal to the novel's development.
Mrs.
Gaskell's
handling of doctrinal differences within the novel merely
indicates the consistency of her philosophy of conciliation
between people of opposing views.
This tolerance for reli-
gious differences is expressed succinctly in these two
sentences:
"Margaret the Churchwoman, her father the Dis-
senter, Higgins the Infidel, knelt down together.
them no harm" (p.
It did
277).
Although Mrs. Gaskell does not include religion in a
didactic manner in North and South, she does not ignore it,
for to do so would have been to deny a major influence in
the lives of her characters.
Edgar Wright most nearly ap-
proaches a psychologically accurate assessment of the religious
function when he says that religion appears as a "counterbalance to self-will."3
He further says that Mrs.
Gaskell
felt discomfort in dealing with a love theme, and that she
interposed religion as a shield against having to face the
subject directly.4
3
Edgar Wright, Mrs.
1965),
(London,
4
Although Wright may be misconstruing Mrs.
p.
184.
[bid., p. 185.
Gaskell: The Basis for Reassessment
41
Gaskell's conscious intentions,
he inadvertently points out
the function of religion for Victorian women.
Peter Cominos says that religion was a major source of
sexual sublimation for women of the Victorian era.
Men used
their work as an outlet, but women, whose lives were restricted within the narrow sphere of family life, turned to
piety and charity as the only proper avenues for expressing
repressed sexuality. 5
Henry Maudsley, a pathologist, wrote,
"Between the instinctive sexual impulses with the emotional
feelings that are connected with them and the conventional
rules of society which prescribe the strictly modest suppres-
sion of them and any display of them, a hard struggle is not
infrequently maintained.?" 6
One of the most potent religious influences exerted upon
the Victorians was Evangelicalism.
The Evangelical movement,
which was low church and fundamentalist, affected many areas
of Victorian life.
Its effect upon sexual mores was profound,
as Evangelicalism preached a strict adherence to stern laws
of morality.
John Wesley had been instrumental in condemning
passions of many kinds, and his followers in the nineteenth
century prohibited any expressions of passion not connected
5 Peter
Cominos, "Innocent Femina Sensualis in Unconscious
Conflict" in Suffer and Be Still, ed. Martha Vicinus (Bloomington, 1972), p. 163.
6 Henry
p.
64.
Maudsley, The Pathology of the Mind
As quoted by Cominos, p. 164.
(London, 1879),
42
with religion.7
One of the characteristics of Evangelicalism
was the humanizing of the Christ figure, with the result that
he could be worshipped as an ideal.
This led to a passionate
devotion to Jesus which had distinctly erotic overtones.
Annie Besant,
in discussing her Evangelical upbringing,
says that in her childhood she first became acquainted with
Jesus through emotional religious tales.
She wished to live
and die for her ideal:
How much easier to be a Christian if one could have
a red-cross shield and a white banner and have a
real devil to fight with and a beautiful Divine
Prince to smile at you when the battle was over.
. . . As I grew older the dreams and fancies grew
less fantastic but more tinged with real enthusiasm.
I read tales of the early Christian martyrs and
passionately regretted I was born so late when no
suffering for religion was practicable.
Besant reveals that her training made no provisions for overt
earthly feeling:
As my girlhood began to bud towards womanhood, all
its deeper currents were set in the direction of
religious devotion.
My mother did not allow me to
read love stories and my daydreams of the future
were scarcely touched by any of the ordinary hopes
and fears of a girl lifting her eyes toward the
world she is shortly to enter.9
She continues,
citing the nature of her feeling towards the
central person in Evangelicalism:
7 Russell
M. Goldfarb, Sexual Repression and Victorian
Literature (Lewisburg, 1970)Tpp. 22-23.
8Annie
1893), p.
Besant, Annie Besant: An Autobiography (London,
42.
Italics are mine.
9 Ibid.,
p. 52.
43
Ever the Christ was the figure round which clus-
tered all my hopes and longings, till I often
felt that the very passion of my devotion would
draw Him down from His throne in heaven vifibly
in form as I felt Him invisibly in spirit.
Although not all Victorian girls had been subjected to
the fanatic relgious training Besant describes,
environment was one of repression.
the general
Religion of any variety
obliquely provided the necessary release of libidinous drives.
In North and South religion functions in the lives of
the women characters as one of a number of indications of
their adaptation to society.
Although, as Cominos says,
religion was a "major source" for the repression of sexual
feelings,
the importance of its use as a device for repression
varied among individual women.
A woman's need for religious
sublimation was influenced by several factors,
including
religious upbringing, placement within a family unit, social
status, and basic temperament.
Mrs. Gaskell's women represent
a broad spectrum of religious expression, ranging from tepid
conventionalism to zealous fanaticism.
The shallow world of Margaret's Aunt Shaw and her cousin
Edith includes only a conventional acceptance of religion.
They find outlet in a life of idle luxury and social amenities.
Edith's discomfort concerning Mr. Hale's position as a Dissenter indicates how little she could consider such matters.
Her most cogent remark concerning religion reveals something
10 Ibid.,
p.
57.
44
of the place its expression held in the vacant round of
London social life.
"For my part
.
.
.
In speaking of Margaret, Edith says,
I am very glad she is a Christian.
I
know so very few!" (p. 493).
Margaret's mother, Mrs. Hale, exhibits no devoutness
beyond her acceptance of the fact that God has ordained that
she must soon die.
Her most fervent feeling is reserved for
her exiled son, Frederick; her preoccupation with him is the
consuming passion of her life.
She admits that the desire
to see Frederick keeps her from praying, even as her life
slips away.
No words of piety come from her at the end; she
is happy only to know that Frederick has arrived to be at her
bedside.
Her life as a minister's wife and the difficulties
arising from her husband's religious doubts have tempered
Mrs. Hale's religious inclinations.
Her hysterical nature
centers on the living and the material, rather than on the
spiritual.
Mrs. Thornton and her daughter, Fanny,
are further ex-
amples of women for whom religion played only a perfunctory
role.
They had other ways of coping with their lives as
Victorian women.
Fanny is too empty-headed to deal with ab-
stractions and concerns herself with the superficialities of
life as a wealthy young lady with "accomplishments."
mother,
Her
strong and straightforward, has reared her son and
daughter in a traditionally Christian manner, but her drives
45
have been deflected into the vicarious masculine world of
her son's business life in Milton.
Religion's sublimating effect can best be seen in the
lives of Margaret Hale and her factory-worker friend,
Bessy
Higgins.
Margaret is affiliated with the staid, dignified
Anglican faith, while Bessy immerses herself in the emotionalism of the Evangelical.
religion differently,
Although the two girls view
they both use it
as a vehicle for
confronting their individual dilemmas.
When Margaret moves to Milton,
she forms a friendship
with the mill-worker Nicholas Higgins and his two daughters,
Bessy and Mary.
Bessy, who is dying of a lung disease, is
extremely religious in the "Methodee"
refers to her type of religion.
and revels
Bessy knows she is dying,
in religious ecstasies,
after-life to this one,
sense, as her father
seeming to prefer the
and with good reason.
She has
lived
a harsh life as a worker in the mills, daily experiencing
the
results of poverty.
She hates the violence and anger that
poverty and poor working conditions spawn, and she longs for
the peace of the grave.
In her first meeting with Margaret,
Bessy, frail and wasted,
says simply to her, "I shall have a
spring where I'm boun'
to,
shining robes besides" (p.
and flowers,
83).
and amaranths,
and
Bessy's father at times grows
impatient with the girl's preoccupation with the after-life.
He tells Margaret, "Hoo's so full of th'
cannot think of the present"
(p.
155).
life to come, hoo
46
Edgar Wright feels that "Bessy Higgins's exaggerated
religiosity
. .
. becomes sentimentalized and melodramatic,
almost a caricature of itself."
But Bessy's longings
serve at least two purposes for her:
she can escape from
her miserable reality of sickness and poverty, and she can
channel the normal erotic feelings of a young woman into
acceptable religious
emotion.
Evangelicalism, with its emphasis on the next world,
appealed to the lower classes who suffered constant deprivation.
Bessy's talk reveals her tiredness of the
between the workers and their employers.
through too much.
strife
She has lived
She tells Margaret, "But it's not for me
to get sick and tired o'
strikes.
This
is the last I'll see.
Before it's ended I shall be in the Great City--the Holy
Jerusalem" (p. 155).
solace,
Although women turned to religion for
the men in Bessy's class frequently turned to drink.
She indicates the longing for escape from the monotony of
her life by sympathizing with the men's escape into drink.
It
is clear
that she finds the same escape
in religion.
She
it were only a tramp to some place in search o' work.
.
.
admits, "I've longed for to be a man to go spreeing, even if
It's little blame to them if they do go into th' gin-shop for
to make their blood flow quicker, and more lively, and see
11
Wright, p. 142.
47
things they never see at no other time--pictures,
glass, and such like"
and looking-
(p. 161).
According to Paul W. Pruyser, a religious person approaching death turns his thoughts from his own frail,
dis-
integrating body to a concept of something pysically enduring:
He does not have to give up entirely the notion of
having a body; the divine example of a resurrection
and the participation in a corporate body of greater
endurance allow him to continue to believe in his
personhood, even when his physical body will give
out.
If then the imagery is further elaborated into
a final rising from the grave, on a far-off day of
judgment,
there is also an anticipatory investment
in the new body, free from decay or limitations,
something to be truly proud of, and to be cherished. 1 2
Bessy's visions give her an exalted sense of her worth as
a person.
Her thoughts of "shining robes"
in the next life
transform her into something and someone very different from
the wretched reality from which she longs to escape.
If the
genteel classes of women above Bessy felt a lack of individuality and "I-ness,"
a girl of Bessy's social status and physical
condition would naturally view herself as infinitesimally
insignificant.
One reason for Bessy's attachment to Margaret
seems to be the dying girl's need to
identify with a healthy,
attractive woman who is alive with vitality and youth.
Bessy
tells Margaret of a recurring dream, supposedly pre-cognitive,
in which an angel-like woman appears in brilliant finery such
as Margaret will wear to the Thornton's dinner-party:
1 2 Paul
W. Pruyser, A Dynamic Psychology of Religion (New
York, 1968), pp. 304-305.
48
"But dun yo' know, I ha'
ever I seed yo'."
"Nonsense, Bessy!"
"Ay, but I did.
dreamt of yo',
long afore
Yo'r very face--looking wi'
yo'r clear steadfast eyes out o' th'
darkness, wi'
yo'r hair blown off from yo'r brow, and going out
like rays round yo'r forehead, which was just as
smooth and straight as it is now--and yo' always
came to give me strenth, which I seemed to gather
out o' yo'r deep comforting eyes--and yo' were drest
in shining raiment--just as yo's going to be drest.
So yo' see, it was yo'!"
"Nay, Bessy," said Margaret gently, "it was but
a dream."
"And why might na I dream a dream
tion as well as others?
Ay, and see visions too!
thinks a deal o' dreams!
as plainly,
Why, even my father
I tell yo' again, I saw yo'
coming swiftly towards me, wi' yo'r hair
blown back wi' the very swiftness of the motion . .
.
Bible?
in my afflic-
Did not many a one i' the
and the white shining dress on you've gotten to wear.
Let me come and see yo' in it.
I want to see yo'
as in very deed yo' were in my dream."
"My dear Bessy, it is quite a fancy of yours."
"Fancy or no fancy--yo've come, as I knew yo'
would, when I saw you're movement
in my dream--and
when you're here about me, I reckon I feel easier in
my mind and comforted just as a fire comforts one
on a dree day . . . please, God, I'll come and see
yo'" (p. 176).
Before Bessy dies,
to Margaret.
she asks to be buried in someting belonging
In so doing, she wishes literally to take a part
of Margaret to the grave with her.
The angel in Bessy's dream
can be seen as the transformed Bessy, in the "New Jerusalem,"
and she can also represent Bessy's feelings for Margaret as a
real person.
While Bessy's religious fancies prepare her for death,
they also allow her to sublimate thoughts of earthly love.
Her feeling for Margaret,
intermingled with religious fervor,
constitutes the only intense human devotion Bessy experiences,
49
except for her love of her father.
having a love-interest,
Never does she mention
even in the time before her sickness.
The dream of the angel is religious in nature, but it is also
distinctly sensual.
Bessy's interest lies in the apocalyptic
visions of the Book of Revelations.
This part of the Bible
has an emotional appeal lacking in Margaret's "clearer parts";
although Margaret tries to dissuade Bessy from dwelling on
the emotion-laden prophecies, the dying girl needs the height-
ened feeling she receives from reading Revelations.
She
claims that her reading that part of the Bible is "as good as
an organ, and as different from everyday, too" (p. 162).
Thus she finds there escape from the ordinary, and she also
experiences sensuality.
She finds her release in her fervent
religion.
While Margaret's manner of expressing her religion varies
from Bessy's,
she too seeks something akin to escape when she
turns to religious thoughts and activities.
In discussing
Margaret's general character, Ffrench comments on her religious
nature.
She says of Margaret that "her interest in religious
matters is strong
.
.
.
She is morally precocious." 1 3
While
it is true that Margaret does exhibit piety throughout the
novel, critics of North and South fail to examine the implications of the instances in which Margaret reveals her "religious"
self.
13
Ffrench, p.
63.
50
An attentive reading of North and South shows a pattern
in Margaret's religious life.
When sexuality draws near,
Margaret retreats to the safety of piety and religious talk.
When she first becomes acquainted with John Thornton,
hides behind a facade of regality and piety.
she
In his presence
she sometimes resorts to stilted, pious language.
In talking
with him about the problems of masters and men, she expresses
her feelings in the language of the Bible:
"When I see men
violent and obstinate in pursuit of their rights,
I may safely
infer that the master is the same; that he is a little ignorant of that spirit which suffereth long and is kind and seeketh
not her own" (p.
144).
Margaret knows the Bible well, as did
most proper Victorian ladies, but the times she chooses
to use
its words reveal her unconscious need for it to function as a
barrier between her and her repressed feelings.
She uses her
religion to keep her sensual nature in control.
When Margaret lies to save her brother,
that Thornton knows of her lie,
of shame.
she feels disgrace and a sense
She suffers agonies of remorse, and, as is her wont
when threatened by conflicting feelings,
religion.
then becomes aware
she turns to her
But as she kneels by her bed to pray,
she becomes
aware that she is equating her fear of God's displeasure with
that of John Thornton's displeasure;
intermingled in her feelings.
God and Thornton become
"She caught herself up at this
with a miserable tremor; here was she classing his low opinion
of her alongside with the displeasure of God"
(p. 339).
51
However, as Margaret grows towards the realization of her
true feelings for Thornton, she ceases to confuse her feelings
of guilt towards God and those towards Thornton.
becomes less laden with pious platitudes;
Her language
she straightforwardly
assesses her situation in relation to him without bringing
God into the matter.
This is not to imply that Margaret's
religious beliefs diminish, but only that she resorts to
religion less as a mechanism of repression than in the beginning.
Another manifestation of Margaret's sublimation of her
feelings for Thornton is displayed in her relationship with
Bessy Higgins.
Margaret,
in conscious earnestness,
flees to
comfort Bessy when her repressed feelings for Thornton must
be handled.
These visits can be seen as symbolic flights
from sexual conflict.
Margaret must avoid having "those kind
of feelings," and she can deny them through acts of mercy.
She also knows that when she is with Bessy,
be upon religion.
the emphasis will
After having to entertain Thornton's mother
and sister, Margaret runs to visit Bessy "as soon as the
visitors were gone" (p. 115).
She visits Bessy on the after-
noon after she has been trying to decide which gown to wear
to the Thorntons'
the party,
dinner-party, and then again on the day of
she goes to see how Bessy is faring.
On the morn-
ing after the riot at the factory, when Margaret defends
Thornton bodily, she hurries to Bessy again.
Here Mrs.
Gaskell is quite overt as to Margaret's intentions:
would go and see Bessy Higgins.
She would banish all
"She
52
recollection of the Thornton family--no need to think of
them till they absolutely stood before her in flesh and
blood" (p. 228).
Finally, after Thornton comes to propose
to her and leaves, rejected, Margaret flies out to "go and
see Bessy Higgins, of course" (p.
236).
She immerses herself
in tending to Bessy, comforting her and reading from the
scriptures.
filial
After she leaves Bessy, she returns home to the
duties of caring for her dying mother, and all thought
of John Thornton is pushed aside--consciously, at least.
Rollo May says of Victorian culture that "when any human
function is repressed as sex then was, it seeps out to color
every other human activity.'
4
In North and South Mrs.
Gaskell's women characters illustrate several Victorian
approaches to sexual sublimation.
The author's intentions
undoubtedly were not conscious, but she provides
insight into
the phenomenon of repression and sublimation through her
accurate phychological rendering of character.
Of the vari-
ous methods of sublimation described, religion is shown to
be one of the most effective because of its high emotional
content, combined with its respectability.
1 4 Rollo
May, Love and Will
(New York,
1969), p. 82.
CHAPTER V
MARGARET AND FREDERICK
Margaret Hale suffered from the same stifling repression
as did other Victorian women.
However,
as has been noted,
her ways of attempting to adjust differ from those of the
stereotyped ideal female.
Whereas several of the characters
in North and South conform to Victorian standards of femininity,
Margaret possesses extraordinary strength and will.
Will
power was a typical Victorian masculine characteristic, but
Margaret continually reveals her desire for this attribute
in solving her problems.
Rollo May says that Victorian will
power was used to help one manipulate his
well as to manipulate himself.
as
This "will" was opposed to
"wish" and was used to deny "wish."
avoiding awareness
surroundings,
Will power was a way of
of sexual urges and impulses that did not
conform to the picture of the controlled, well-managed self.
This description of will is applicable to Margaret, yet one
wonders why she, more than most of the other females in North
and South,
control.
has a bent towards masculine dominance and selfPart of the answer must lie in Margaret's attitudes
towards her brother,
1 Rollo
Frederick.
May, Love and Will
53
(New York,
1969), p.
205.
54
Mrs. Gaskell reveals early in the novel that Margaret
has a brother living in exile because of his part in a mutiny.
As the story develops,
characters make allusions
arousing interest in him and his misfortunes.
Mrs. Hale is dying, Frederick arrives,
from Margaret.
to Frederick,
Then, when
summoned by a letter
He remains only for a few days,
from England to remain in exile in Spain.
then flees
During his brief
visit, Frederick, because of being seen with Margaret
at
night in a railway station, complicates his sister's
relationship with John Thornton.
Some critics feel that Frederick
is too artificially included in the novel for this
one purpose
and that his role is an embarrassing slip in Mrs. Gaskell's
art.
Gerald De Witt Sanders says that "too much is made of
Frederick's visit and Margaret's contact with him, from
which
nothing results.
Frederick
.
.
.
acts merely a puppet's part
and is then shunted off with perfect indifference." 2
Edgar Wright comments that "the introduction of Frederick
is
pure plot-spinning." 3
Because Frederick has counterparts
in other Gaskell novels,
the biographical implications cannot be ignored.
brother, John Stevenson, was a lieutenant
Mrs. Gaskell's
in the merchant ser-
vice and sailed for India when Elizabeth was about twelve
years
2 Gerald
1929),
p. 69.
3 Edgar
De Witt Sanders, Elizabeth Gaskell
(New Haven,
Wright, Mrs. Gaskell: The Basis for Reassessment
(London, 1965), p.
144.
55
old.
He never returned, and the true facts of his disappear-
ance were never known.
Annette Hopkins says that the family
held the tradition that he was captured by pirates;
another
version of his disappearance was that he arrived in India,
Calcutta, and was never seen again.4
at
Arthur Pollard, in
discussing Frederick as a character in North and South, says
that "the lost loved one was a character with a tremendous
appeal for Mrs.
gest that Mrs.
.
. .may
Gaskell.
.
.
. It is not extravagant to sug-
Gaskell's thoughts about her own lost brother
well have led to her frequent recurrence to this
topic."5
Peter Jenkyns in Cranford bears a similarity to Frederick
and to Mrs. Gaskell's brother, John.
Miss Matty's brother,
"poor Peter," returns from India after having run away to sea
many years before.
In Mary Barton, Will Wilson, a young
seaman like Frederick,
comes to dreary Manchester with tales
of his adventures in distant ports.
Although critics emphasize
the "lost loved one" aspect
of characters
and Frederick,
interestingly,
who is also,
"poor Frederick,"
such as "poor Peter"
referred to as
the aura of freedom surrounding
generally overlooked.
them is
All these characters serve the purpose
of bringing vicarious adventure into the lives of the other
4 Annette
B. Hopkins, Mrs.
Gaskell: Her Life and Work (New
York, 1971), pp. 14-15.
5 Arthur
Pollard, Mrs. Gaskell, Novelist and Biographer
(Cambridge, 1966) , p. 115.
56
characters in the novels who have not had an opportunity to
see the world beyond their narrow sphere.
In discussing Frederick, the critics ignore the psychological importance he holds in his sister's development.
Viewed in this manner,
Frederick's
intrusion into the story
constitutes not an artistic misfortune, but a furtherance
of
the underlying theme of sexual conflict.
part in the development of the story,
Frederick plays a
and his presence also
helps Margaret in her attempt to find a balance within
herself.
Frederick,
as one who has travelled to distant ports, had
exotic adventures,
and put his life in jeopardy for conscience's
sake, is certain to be looked upon by Margaret,
counterpart,
his female
as a person to envy, admire, and emulate.
He has
freedom of which she can only dream in her restricted
world.
In addition to these advantages over his sister, Frederick
is
the first-born child of the family, unconditionally adored
by
his mother with whom Margaret has shared a less than
satisfactory relationship.
When Margaret returns to Helstone to
live with her parents,
she wonders to herself what has become
of Frederick; her information concerning him has been negligible.
At this point,
she knows only that he was involved in
a mutiny and is now far away in exile.
Frederick's name is
seldom mentioned by her parents, making Margaret loath to ask
questions concerning him.
"Master Frederick."
Her mother's maid, Dixon,
had adored
Although she does no other housekeeping,
Dixon weekly dusts her favorite's room "as if he might be
57
coming
home that very evening"
(p.
20).
Margaret
feels
in-
tense interest in her brother's fate, but Mrs. Gaskell conveys
a sense of wistfulness in the girl as the result of being left
out of this very important part of her parents'
lives.
Margaret vacillates concerning which parent to question:
"When she was with her mother, her father seemd the best person
to apply to for information; and when with him, she thought
that she could speak more easily to her mother" (p. 19).
Margaret wishes for a close relationship with her mother,
but she finds she must compete with the absent Frederick.
Milton, nursing her mother in her final illness,
In
she learns
the details of Frederick's life and his part in the mutiny.
When Margaret is told of how Frederick led the mutiny in protest against a fatal injustice to a fellow seaman, she expresses
pride in her brother's actions.
Mrs. Hale pours out the story,
apparently oblivious of any jealousy she might arouse in her
daughter:
"'He was my first baby, Margaret.'
Mrs.
Hale spoke
wistfully, and almost as if apologizing for the yearning,
craving wish, as though it were a depreciation of her remaining
child" (p. 127).
Then Mrs. Gaskell adds that "such an idea
never crossed Margaret's mind"
(p.
127).
Mrs. Hale grows des-
pondent as she thinks of Frederick's fate should he return to
England.
When Margaret tries to comfort her mother, Mrs. Hale
turns her face to the wall and "took her hand out of Margaret's
with a little impatient movement,
as if she would fain be left
alone with the recollection of her son"
(p. 127).
Perhaps on
58
a conscious level Margaret did not resent Frederick and did
not wish that she too were an unconditionally loved and
admired male child, free to see the world as he had done and
still retain the love and respect of his parents.
However,
Mrs. Gaskell comments later that "Margaret was not a ready
lover, but where she loved, she loved passionately and with
no small degree of jealousy" (p. 146).
As Mrs. Hale's illness progresses,
she and Margaret
have many long talks, and the mother reminisces about the
days when her children were babies.
She replies to Margaret's
question of what Fred was like when he was a baby:
"Why,
Margaret, you must not be hurt, but he was much prettier than
you were.
I remember, when I first saw you in Dixon's arms,
I said, 'Dear, what an ugly little thing!' and she said,
'It's not every child that's like Master Fred, bless him'"
(p. 241).
Margaret has come to care for her mother very much
just as she is on the threshold of losing her, and Mrs. Hale's
preoccupation with thoughts of Frederick adds to Margaret's
feelings of being in second place with her mother.
When Dixon
thinks to usurp Margaret as chief nurse for her mother,
Margaret resents being thought of as weak by Dixon;
she then
implores her mother:
"Let me be in the first place, Mother,
I am greedy of that.,
I used to fancy you would forget me
while I was away at Aunt Shaw's"
(p. 151).
After this direct
appeal by her daughter, Mrs. Hale cries out again for Frederick
and puts herself into such an emotional state that Dixon must
59
be recalled to help.
means to her also.
Dixon talks of how much Master Frederick
She tells Margaret how she likes to see
her showing a "bit of spirit" and says to her:
"When you fire
up you're the very image of Master Frederick" (p. 153).
Thus,
Margaret finds herself continually pitted against the image of
her
absent brother.
Although Frederick in his absence is both a rival and a
model for Margaret, his arrival in Milton allows her to add
new dimensions to her personality by loving interaction with
a strong male.
When Frederick returns surreptitiously to see
his mother before her death, Margaret is shown what
it is like
to be petted and treated in the traditional manner by a male.
She feels a sense of pleasure in his masculine strength, as
compared with her father's weakness.
She is only too happy
to relinquish some of the burdens she had carried before his
arrival:
to bear,
"She knew then how much responsibility she had had
from the exquisite sensation of relief which she felt
in Frederick's presence"
(p.
293).
Before Frederick's arrival,
Margaret tells her mother that she will "watch over him like
a lioness over her young
(p.
281).
However, when Frederick
is with the family in Milton, the brother and sister are able
to give to one another equally, sharing in their ability to
meet one another's needs.
gentle, paternal.way,
Frederick treats Margaret in a
and for the first time in the novel she
is referred to as something besides a regal queen.
banters with her in a tenderly teasing manner:
Frederick
60
"But, Margaret, what a bungler you are!
I never
saw such a little awkward, good-for-nothing pair
of hands.
Run away, and wash them, ready to cut
bread-and-butter for me, and leave the fire.
I'll
manage it.
Lighting fires is one of my natural
accomplishments."
So Margaret went away; and returned; and
passed in and out of the room, in a glad restlessness that could not be satisfied with sitting
still.
The more wants Frederick had, the better
she was pleased; and he understood all this by
instinct (pp. 291-292).
Margaret, strong and stoical in the face of so many
difficulties, allows herself to be soothed and tended by her
stalwart brother as their mother lies on her deathbed.
She
accepts solace from her brother and listens to his words
of
hope, whereas so often before, without him,
be the strength of the family.
she has had to
His loving admonitions keep
her going ahead just when she is ready to give way to despair.
Frederick tells her,
"Come, come, come!
Let us go upstairs, and do
something, rather than waste time that may be so
precious.
Thinking has, many a time, made me sad,
darling; but doing never did in all my life" (p. 295).
When Mrs. Hale dies, Frederick gives way to paroxyms of
grief, and Margaret must for a while be the comforter of both
her father and brother;
but Frederick overcomes his first
sorrow and once again cares for Margaret.
This reciprocal
giving is the first that Margaret has known, and it prepares
her way for taking the next step into womanhood.
Thus,
in Frederick, Margaret sees the advantages of being
a strong male with mother's unconditional love, but she is
also shown the benefits of womanhood when her brother treats
61
her with deference and appeals to that side of her nature
she has kept pushed down--the more "feminine" passive side.
Freud would have said that in her relations to her
mother and her emulation of her brother, Margaret suffered
from penis-envy.
The modern psychologist Clara Thompson
says that women do not want to be men, but simply envy them
their position in society's structure. 6
Margaret is faced with even more conflicts than the
average Victorian woman in that she not only has the patri-
archal system to "keep her in her place," but she also has
a brother who, by the nature of his life and family relationships, gives her more motivation to be both attracted to and
repelled by the masculine world.
Margaret must contend with feelings of guilt and shame
about her female sexuality because of the way Victorian females
were taught, but she must also struggle to find a balance
between the two elements in her sexuality.
The assertive
masculine side of Margaret's personality never entirely recedes;
she knows the value of will and masculine strength.
But Margaret also begins, gradually,
taking role as a woman.
to accept her giving and
Frederick helps her to take those
first steps towards balance.
6 Clara
Thompson, "'Penis Envy' in Women," Psychoanalysis
and Female Sexuality, ed. H. M. Ruitenbeek (New Haven, 1966),
p. 246.7
CHAPTER VI
MARGARET HALE AND JOHN THORNTON
Throughout North and South Margaret Hale encounters the
challenge of growing away from restrictive sexual conflicts.
Various persons and events affect her reaching towards autonomy, but the most influential force in Margaret's life proves
to be John Thornton, the man with whom she falls in love.
The process of Margaret's gradual acceptance of her love for
Thornton controls the novel.
The fact that Margaret's growth
to maturity is tortuous reflects Mrs.
and psychological awareness.
Gaskell's innate social
In her delineation of Margaret's
relationship with John Thornton, the author faithfully depicts
the pressures exerted by Victorian society upon middle-and
upper-class young women.
Mrs. Gaskell's handling of Margaret's
feelings and behavior as opposed to those of Thornton also
illustrates the Victorian concept of feminine versus masculine
sexuality and its
expression.
Fear of sexuality had a strong
impact on Victorian life,
but society acknowledged the male as a sexual being, although
the idea was distasteful.
Women, however, with their sup-
posed lack of sexual feeling,
adoration.
served as chaste objects of
Dr. Acton concedes that some women, few indeed,
feel a sexual passion exceeding that of men, but his conclusion is that "as a general rule,
62
a modest woman seldom desires
63
any sexual gratification for herself.
She submits to her
husband, but only to please him; and, but for the desire of
maternity, would far rather be relieved from his attentions."1
Accordingly overt expression of sexuality in North and South
comes from the thoughts and observations of John Thornton.
While Margaret continually denies her feelings of attraction
towards him, resorting to hostility, haughtiness,
and guilt,
Thornton is quite aware of what her femininity does to him.
He may be alarmed by the fact that Margaret has a strong
power over him, but at least his feelings exist in his conscious mind; Margaret must cope unconsciously with her feelings
towards Thornton.
Because many of Margaret's conflicts arise from repression, criticism concerning North and South focuses on
Thornton's passion for her and ignores the heroine's psychological dilemma.
Arthur Pollard says that "Mrs. Gaskell traces
very delicately the birth and growth of Thornton's passion
for Margaret."2
Edgar Wright, discussing Mrs. Gaskell's
discomfort in dealing with sexual matters, says that the
existence of passion "had edged into her treatment of Thornton
in North and South.
. . . A less hectic, more spiritualized
1 William
Acton, The Functions and Disorders of the
Reproductive Organs, is-quoted Ty Steven Marcus in The7Other
Victorians (New York, 1964) , p. 31.
2Arthur.Pollard,
Mrs.
(Cambridge, 1966), p. 115.
Gaskell: Novelist and Biographer
Italics are mine.
64
view of love is certainly the one with which she is more at
ease.,,3
Wright implies that Mrs. Gaskell's reservations
about openly handling passion result from her own repressions
and that the matter should be left to psychologists.4
He
fails to note that the author, in her portrayal of a burgeoning Victorian love relationship, has invested her work with
psychological accuracy.
From the beginning of the acquaintance between Margaret
and Thornton, Mrs. Gaskell allows him the advantage of knowing
and expressing to himself Margaret's effect upon him.
At
their first meeting, Thornton is instantly struck with
Margaret's physical beauty:
She sat facing him and facing the light; her full
beauty met his eye; her round white flexile throat
rising out of the full, yet lithe figure; her lips
moving so slightly as she spoke, not breaking the
cold serene look of her face with any variation
from the one lovely haughty curve; her eyes, with
their soft gloom, meeting his with quiet maiden
freedom (p. 71).
When Thornton comes to tea for their second meeting, he
watches Margaret arranging the tea service; his observation
on this occasion is more intimate than on the former visit:
She had a bracelet on one taper arm, which would
Mr. Thornton
fall down over her round wrist.
watched the replacing of this troublesome ornament
with far more attention than he listened to her
It seemed as if it fascinated him to see
father.
her push it up impatiently until it tightened her
3 Edgar
Wright, Mrs. Gaskell: The Basis for Reassessment
(London, 1965), p. 132.
4 Ibid.,
p.
185.
65
soft flesh; and then to mark the loosening--the
fall.
He could almost have exclaimed--"There it
goes again!"
There was so little left to be done
after he arrived at the preparation for tea, that
he was almost sorry the obligation of eating and
drinking came so soon to prevent his watching
Margaret (p. 91).
As the story progresses, Thornton's awareness of Margaret
increases.
When Margaret and her father attend a dinner-party
at the Thorntons', the host can hardly make himself aware of
anyone except his lovely guest:
"He shook hands with Margaret.
He knew it was the first time their hands had met, though she
was perfectly unconscious of the fact.
anew with her great beauty.
.
. He was struck
.
He had never seen her in such
dress before; and yet now it appeared
. .
go always thus apparelled"
After Margaret shields
(p. 191).
Thornton bodily from the angry strikers
. that she ought to
in front of his home,
in recalling the event in his mind he remembers only "the
touch of her arms around his neck--the soft clinging which
made the dark colour come and go in his cheek as he thought
of it"
(p. 223).
Over and over he thinks of her, even after
she has rejected his proposal of marriage,
is hardly an ethereal one;
it is earthy and passionate.
remembers her "beautiful eyes,
which lay so close to his
and his remembrance
He
that half-open sighing mouth,
shoulder only yesterday"
He tries, by using his Victorian willpower,
(p.
246).
to forget her:
"He knew how much he had to do--more than his usual work,
owing to the commotion of the day before.
brother magistrates;
He had to see his
he had to complete the arrangements,
66
only half made in the morning, for the comfort and safety of
his newly imported Irish hands"
(p.
247).
But even this
approach is of no avail.
Thornton thinks of Margaret in
every dress she had worn,
in every mood, with every expression.
He need not and cannot hide his longing for Margaret from
himself.
He need not indulge in all the psychic subterfuge
that she must go through; he is frankly and passionately in
love with her, and he knows it.
He feels pain because of his
love and the rejection he encounters, but at least it is a
known pain, a conscious feeling of knowing what he wants and
cannot have.
When Thornton feels that his
is a lost cause
with Margaret and that she cares for someone else, he stoically resigns himself to that fact, but he is never in doubt
as to his conscious feelings.
Such awareness cannot be for
Margaret.
Peter Cominos says of Victorian women:
Repression removed the sexual instinct from awareness but being irrepressible, not from existence,
and it therefore exercised a profound influence
upon the repressed daughter.
She became subject
to motives and desires of which she was not aware.
She acted upon motives unconscious of their
origin 5
and was spared the knowledge of what she was doing.
An examination of Margaret's interaction with John
Thornton reveals that she uses many of the unconscious defenses demanded by a repressive upbringing.
5 Peter
As mentioned in
Cominos, "Innocent Femina Sensualis in Unconscious
Conflict," in Suffer and Be Still, ed. Martha Vicinus (Bloomington, 1972), p. 164.
67
an earlier chapter, Margaret felt the first intrusion of
adult sexuality when Henry Lennox proposed to her in Helstone.
However, she does not have to face the ultimate test of
leaving Victorian girlhood behind until she moves to Milton
and meets John Thornton.
When the Hales commence their new
life in Milton, Margaret begins to associate with people of
whom she has heretofore had no knowledge.
She becomes
acquainted with rough mill workers, factory girls, and powerful,
ambitious manufacturers.
Margaret's gentle father feels
a sense of awe towards the power of the Milton way of life,
but Margaret,
in fear masked as disdain, goes "less abroad,
among machinery and men" (pp. 78-9).
She dislikes the "shoppy"
people in Milton, but is, from the beginning, impressed,
while at the same time repelled, by John Thornton, who, by
his independence and strength of will, has become one of the
most powerful manufacturers in Milton.
Margaret meets Thornton
when he comes to be tutored by her father in the Hales'
home.
From the beginning, she relies upon her "maidenly dignity"
to keep herself at a distance from this man who displays
qualities of masculinity that she has never before encountered.
But Thornton has struck a chord of attraction deep within
Margaret, and the remainder of the novel,
think Mrs.
although one cannot
Gaskell consciously meant it to be,
is a picture
of the struggle within Margaret to accept the fact that she
is a woman with a normal woman's feelings.
At every step
along the way, Margaret tries unconsciously to frustrate
these feelings.
68
Margaret uses a casual disdain as her first defense
against recognizing any attraction towards John Thornton.
When asked by her mother what he is like, Margaret shows
little interest:
"Oh! I hardly know what he is like," said
Margaret lazily; too tired to tax her powers of
description much.
And then rousing herself, she
said, "He is a tall, broad-shouldered man, about--
how old, papa?"
"I should guess about thirty."
"About thirty--with a face that is neither
exactly plain, nor yet handsome, nothing remarkable
--not quite a gentlemen; but that was hardly to be
expected"
(p.
73).
When Thornton is to come to call, Margaret hides her feelings
under a cloak of tiredness and one of the bad headaches to
which she had lately become susceptible.
As the relationship
progresses, Margaret becomes aware of the characteristics in
Thornton she admires, but a constant verbal badinage exists
between the two on the surface.
Margaret's "innocent" mind
continually turns away to thoughts other than Thornton.
Margaret's greatest inner struggles begin when she defends Thornton from the strikers at his mill.
The women in
his house see this action as an overt display of interest on
Margaret's part,
and in her stupor after being hit by a rock
thrown by one of the workmen, Margaret
is horrified to hear
what the women say about her:
"Well, miss, since you will have it--Sarah,
you see, was in the best place for seeing, being
at the right-hand window; and she says, and said
at the very time too, that she saw Miss Hale with
her arms about master's neck, hugging him before
all the people."
69
"I don't believe it," said Fanny.
"I know
she cares for my brother; anyone can see that;
and I dare say she'd give her eyes if he'd marry
her--which he never will, I can tell her.
But I
don't believe she'd be so bold and forward as to
put her arms round his neck" (p. 217).
Margaret, from a twentieth-century point of view, overreacts
to the situation:
"Ah!" said she, clenching her hands together, "It
is no wonder those people thought I was in love
with him, after disgracing myself in that way, I
in love--and with him too!" Her pale cheeks suddenly became one flame of fire;
and she covered
her face with her hands.
When she took them away,
her palms were wet with scalding tears (p. 226).
Margaret continues to agonize over her disgrace,
out in anguish:
then cries
"Let them insult my maiden pride as they
will--I walk pure before God!" (p. 226).
This strong reaction
reveals how greatly a Victorian woman valued her reputation
as a "modest woman."
The loss of her sense of maidenliness
was an incredible blow because of the emphasis placed upon
modesty and virtue.
Walter Houghton, writing of the Victorian
exaltation of purity in women,
as
creatures more
says that women were revered
like angels than human beings."
Any
suspicion concerning a woman's motives cast a shadow over her
reputation,
and the idea that anyone would think her "impure"
appalled Margaret.
When she returns home after the strike, Margaret manages
to hide her shame from her parents.
6 Walter
1870
She stoically conceals
E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind,
(New Haven, 1957), p. 355.
1830-
70
the pain she feels from the blow on her head, making small
talk with her father until her strength fails her.
She
passes a restless night, seeing many accusing eyes looking
at her in shame.
blowing,
The next morning, there is a slight breeze
and it reminds her of green woods and the rushing,
falling sounds of water;
she somehow feels better--"an echo
of distant gladness in her heart"
echo of times past,
John Thornton.
out of her mind,
(p. 228).
Or perhaps,
a remembrance of innocence,
an
far away from
When these thoughts fail to keep Thornton
she decides to go see Bessy Higgins, using
the device of religious compassion as a denial of sensuality.
But before she can carry out this plan to divert her mind,
Thornton comes to the house with his avowal of love.
As she
stands before him in her shame, she "looked like some prisoner,
falsely accused of a crime she loathed and despised"
(p.
230).
When Thornton expresses his gratitude and then, his love,
feels shock and tells him his way of speaking
she
is "blasphemous.
She speaks of the "sanctity of her sex" and her woman's
"reverenced helplessness"
the day before.
as reasons for her shielding him
She speaks as though she truly felt there
were some religious awe connected with being a woman, and in
the Victorian sense, there was.
The mob obviously would not
attack Thornton with a woman standing in front of him.
In
her shame and indignation that he would think this action was
a sign of love for him as an individual,
she would have done the same for any man.
she tells him that
She thus covers
71
her feelings for him by a statement of general compassion.
As noted earlier,
general compassion on the part of a woman
was a very acceptable Victorian concept--sexual attraction
was not.
When Thornton has gone, Margaret contemplates his words
of love,
and "she shrank and shuddered as under the fascina-
tion of some great power, repugnant to her whole previous
life" (p. 235).
Margaret, feeling her defenses weakened by
Thornton's ardent statement of love for her,
"disliked him
the more for having mastered her inner will" (p.
235).
When
Thornton's overt talk of love brings her feelings closer to
the surface,
she experiences panic.
Margaret must struggle
with that "great power" without actually knowing the basis
for the struggle.
She cannot face what is going on within her.
Margaret endures another battle of unconscious origin
when her brother comes to Milton to see their dying mother.
Margaret's deep sense of shame and Thornton's reaction when
she tells a lie to save Frederick vividly point out what
Victorian men expected of their women and what price women
had to pay in misplaced guilt.
Frederick is hurriedly leaving
Milton by train after Mrs. Hale's death;
he and Margaret are
standing near the station talking where Thornton sees them as
he passes by.
Thornton, not knowing about the brother, mis-
takenly assumes Frederick to be Margaret's lover.
Later,
when Margaret is questioned by an inspector about a fatal
incident that occurred that night,
7 The
she lies to save Frederick,
word "lover" in the Victorian sense means "sweetheart."
72
reiterating several times "I was not there" (p. 325).
At
first, Margaret's anguished reaction to her telling of a lie
to save her brother from possible death seems strange.
Margaret's religiosity could explain her guilt;
she conscious-
However, from an
ly feels guilt before God for lying.
unconscious view-point, her actions become clearer.
Margaret
can consciously admit that she feels disturbance because
Thornton saw her with Frederick and would assume she was out
after nightfall with a lover.
This is the real underlying
cause of her anxiety, although she punishes herself with the
thought that Thornton knows she is a liar.
points out that Margaret
else,
that he, or anyone
could find cause for suspicion in what was
her brother"
as her accompanying
sense;
"never dreamed
Mrs. Gaskell
if
Margaret
(p.
336).
were thinking clearly,
so natural
This does not make
she would have
realized that Thornton had no idea she had a brother.
agonizes
Margaret
alone, not even sharing with her father the "religious"
despair at being "humbled before God."
Although she and her
father have shared griefs before, Margaret cannot bring this
burden to him because of the underlying nature of her pain.
Margaret prays, but her guilt remains,
bear it stoically.
and she resolves to
But even the mention of John Thornton's
name produces a "relapse into the feeling of depressed, preoccupied exhaustion"
in this period.
(p. 342)
that she experiences frequently
She suffers from listlessness and languor,
but she is not aware of the entire cause.
73
Only when Thornton's mother comes to remonstrate with
her about the actions at the railway station and to insinuate
some kind of wrong-doing on Margaret's part, does it consciously occur to her what Thornton must believe about her.
And this all occurs to her after Mrs.
Thornton leaves.
She
thinks of all the implications in Thornton's mistaken notions
about her, but she cannot make herself come to complete
realization of her feelings:
Then, as a new thought came across her, she pressed
her hands tightly together-"He, too, must take poor Frederick for some
lover."
(She blushed as the word passed through
her mind.)
"I see it now.
It is not merely that
he knows of my falsehood, but he believes that
some one else cares for me; and that I--Oh dear!
--oh dear! What shall I do? What do I mean?
Why do I care what he thinks beyond the mere loss
of his good opinion as regards my telling the
truth or not?
I cannot tell.
But I am very miserable. . . . What has happened to make me so morbid
to-day?
I do not know.
I only know I cannot help
it.
I only know I must give way sometimes.
No,
I will not though," said she, springing to her
feet.
"I will not--I will not think of myself and
my own position.
I won't examine into my own
feelings (pp. 383-84).
Margaret's inability to understand her own emotions and her
sense of pride prevent her from facing Thornton with the truth
about her brother and her lie told to protect him.
When Thornton learns from Nicholas Higgins that Margaret
has a brother and that it was he with whom she was standing
on that fateful night,
reasons.
his sense of relief is great for two
He now knows that Frederick presents no problem
as a rival;
relief for this reason is natural in any age.
74
Thornton's
second reason for relief reveals more about
Victorian attitudes.
Cominos
fied into polar extremes.
says that "women were classi-
They were either sexless minister-
ing angels or sensuously oversexed temptresses of the devil." 8
Thornton obviously did not think of Margaret in either of
these two extreme categories,
but he was a Victorian and was
influenced by the same strict social code that affected
Margaret.
His doubts about the woman whom he idealized
indicate how deeply ingrained his notions were:
"How could
one so pure have stooped from her decorous and noble manner
of bearing!
But was it decorous--was it?" (p.
331).
Mrs.
Thornton voices the same sentiments when she confronts
Margaret about her supposed misconduct:
sake,
"For your mother's
I have thought it right to warn you against such im-
proprieties; they must degrade you in the long run in the
estimation of the world,
you to positive harm"
(p.
even if in fact they do not lead
376).
lifted when he learns the truth:
unmaidenly:
(p.
504).
Thornton feels a burden
"I knew she could not be
and yet I yearned for conviction.
Now I am glad!"
Now Thornton could think of Margaret in the way
he had before "the lie."
His mistrust of Margaret and her
psychological trauma point out the strength of the "good
woman or whore" philosophy.
The idea of Margaret's possibly
having been involved in a homicide becomes secondary to the
8 Cominos,
p. 168.
75
thought that she could have behaved in an unmaidenly way.
Margaret's gradual realization of her love for John
Thornton allows her to triumph over the inner conflicts that
beset her from the beginning of the novel.
She travels a
circuitous route from the day in Helstone when she, in offended dignity, refuses Henry Lennox's proposal, to the day in
London when she and Thornton openly express their mutual love.
Margaret's unconscious denial of herself as a sexual being
causes anxiety that to her seems the result of other problems
in her life.
She did,
indeed, face many trials such as the
family's leaving their beloved Helstone;
her mother's illness
and death; concern for her brother, Frederick;
her father;
Milton.
the death of
and the trials of her factory-worker friends in
Margaret had courage and determination to face out-
ward upheavals and tragedy, but her efforts to repress normal
feminine emotions cause reactions both confusing and painful
to her.
After the deaths of both her parents, Margaret returns
to London to live again with her Aunt Shaw.
Lennox renew their acquaintance,
She and Henry
but her thoughts continually
return to John Thornton in Milton.
The quiet life she leads
in mourning gives her time for contemplation and growth.
Margaret's friend and god-father,
Mr.
Bell, accompanies her
on a visit to Helstone, and here she realizes that change is
inevitable in life.
After having re-visited the home of her
76
childhood, Margaret resolves never to return again.
One
senses a step forward for Margaret as she says goodbye to
the distant past.
However, Margaret's immediate past in
Milton remains with her.
Resignedly, she thinks that if
only Thornton could regain his respect for her, she could
face the future without his love.
When Mr. Bell dies,
he leaves his fortune to Margaret,
thus enabling her to think of arranging her life to suit
herself.
During a holiday at the seashore,
Margaret
sits
for
many hours of each day, gazing at the waves, thinking of her
existence:
But all this time for thought enabled Margaret
to put events in their right places, as to origin
and significance, both as regarded her past life
and her future.
Those hours by the seaside were
not lost, as anyone might have seen who had had the
perception to read, or care to understand, the look
that Margaret's face was gradually acquiring (p. 495).
Margaret was acquiring maturity;
she had grown beyond being
the girl who "could not--would not" look at her feelings to
a young woman who could accept responsibility for her own life.
The culmination of Margaret's quest for balance occurs
when Thornton comes to London.
The two see one another again,
both having changed and grown in acceptance and understanding
of themselves.
On the last page of the novel, Helstone is
glimpsed again briefly.
Thornton shows Margaret some roses
he has carried with him for a long time.
Margaret, recogniz-
ing that they come from Helstone, playfully asks that he give
them to her.
He replies that he will, but that she must pay
77
him for them.
In the beginning of the novel, when Henry
Lennox picked roses for Margaret at Helstone, she accepted
them and carried them into the house without giving anything
in return.
But now Margaret can accept the fact that in order
to receive this symbol of womanhood and love, she must give
of herself in return.
She has grown from a girl burdened
with repression and its attendant anxiety to a woman who knows
she cares deeply for a man.
She has also grown from a girl
who fears authority and submission to it
to a woman who
recognizes that a balance can exist between extremes.
Early
in the novel, Margaret expresses her views about "masters and
men" working together; her words apply to each level of conflict
within the novel:
mutually dependent"
(p.
"God has made us so that we must be
143).
Mrs.
Gaskell's theme of
reconciliation of conflicts achieves its final expression in
the union of Margaret and Thornton.
CHAPTER VII
CONCLUSION
When viewed as a novel of multi-layered conflict, Mrs.
Gaskell's North and South gives insight into several Victorian
areas of concern.
The industrial struggle between manufactur-
ers and workers and the cultural divisions between North and
South provide the background against which more personal
conflicts may be explored.
In her presentation of male and
female characters, Mrs. Gaskell reveals Victorian attitudes
concerning the respective roles of the sexes;
at the deepest
level of the novel, one can discern the effect of sexual mores
upon individual characters.
Conflict and the struggle for
reconciliation of conflict provide the basic theme at every
level of the novel, with Margaret Hale's inner conflicts
constituting the major underlying focus.
An attempt to analyze the theme of a literary work involves the problem of authorial intention;
in any literary era,
this problem exists
but the Victorian age presents more
difficulties than others because of the repressive nature of
the times.
Elizabeth Gaskell's intentions in the writing of
North and South can never be fully ascertained, but there can
be no doubt that a thematic pattern exists.
David Daiches,
discussing structural pattern in literature, says that "pattern
78
79
always exists, but it may exist as a by-product of which the
creator is unconscious."'
The theme of conflict and recon-
ciliation follows a pattern throughout North and South, but
Mrs.
Gaskell's levels of consciousness in presenting the
story can only be surmised.
Certainly,
the industrial and
cultural conflicts are consciously worked out, but as the
author presents and develops conflicts within the characters,
conscious and unconscious motivations become less distinct.
One point is clear, however; Mrs. Gaskell wrote truthfully.
The twentieth-century reader who is ignorant of Victorian
standards may not fully empathize with the actions of Margaret
Hale,
but when she is placed in her proper context, Margaret's
motivations become consistent with reality as she and Mrs.
Gaskell knew it.
Her responses,
are psychologically real.
Thus,
though culturally conditioned,
she and the other characters
can be accepted as actualities.
Henry James said of Mrs.
Gaskell that "writing was a
matter of pure feeling with her." 2
Indeed, the feeling she
had consisted of a keenness of insight that gives a sense of
"rightness"
Mrs.
to her work.
Gaskell's presentation of various personality types
in North and South indicates
her close scrutiny and understanding
1 David
Critics
Daiches, A Study of Literature for Readers and
(New York, 1964), n. 1, p. 83.
2 Henry
James, "Wives and Daughters," The Nation,
No. 2 (Feb., 1866) , 246-247.
34,
80
of people.
With realism she depicts the effects of nineteenth-
century England upon her female characters.
Women who conform
to the stereotype of Victorian femininity are evident throughout, not as caricatures,
but as embodiments of a code that
Mrs. Gaskell knew well.
Although the author never directly
comments upon the matter,
Shaw, Mrs. Hale,
she allows characters such as Edith
and Fanny Thornton to give a picture of the
way many women adapted to Victorian society.
Mrs. Thornton
and Margaret Hale serve as examples of alternative methods of
coping with femininity in their social structure.
Mrs. Gaskell's handling of religion in North and South
faithfully reproduces one important phenomenon of Victorianism.
Mr.
Hale's Dissenter's stance, Margaret's piety, and Bessy
Higgins's Methodism all contribute to the overt realism of the
novel.
The psychological uses of religion within the novel
indicate one Victorian outlet for repressed sexuality.
Mrs. Gaskell displays deep psychological insight in the
development of the character of Margaret Hale.
Margaret's
early insistent denial of her love for Thornton and her
gradual realization of her feelings constitute an accurate
portrayal of the process
of growing from repression to the
conscious awareness of sexuality.
Margaret's various re-
lationships with men in the novel indicate her inner conflicts
concerning sexuality.
Thornton all contribute
Henry Lennox, Frederick, and John
to Margaret's growth towards womanhood.
81
Mrs. Gaskell's development of Margaret from the innocence of
her Helstone days to the time of her acceptance of Thornton
in London reveals the author's ability to look beneath the
surface and discern the reality of psychological conflict.
One hundred one years ago, an article written in The
Cornhill Magazine contained the following statement:
Let Mrs. Gaskell's novels be read after the lapse
of a hundred years, and one feels that the verdict
delivered then would be that they were penned by
the hand of a true observer--one who not only
studied human nature with a desire, but a capacity,
to comprehend it.
The consensus of modern criticism justifies this prediction.
Elizabeth Gaskell's close observation of her fellow Victorians
gives insight into her contemporary society.
Although many
of the problems with which she concerns herself were of
particular significance for her era, conflict and the attempt
to find reconciliation are basic facts of human existence.
3 George
Barnett Smith, "Mrs. Gaskell and Her Novels,"
The Cornhill Magazine, 29 (Jan., 1874), 212.
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